Ruiner (novel)
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| Author | Damien Blake |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | |
| Language | English |
| Genre | satire, horror, postmodernism |
| Published | 2 February 2022 |
| Publisher | Amazon E. Whipple Publishing House |
| Pages | 998 |
| ISBN | 979-8766708179 Parameter error in {{ISBN}}: Invalid ISBN. 9798766708179 Search this book on  . |
Ruiner, is the second novel of Damien Blake, published through E. Whipple Publishing House and Amazon in February 2022 in paperback format. The second volume was published in July of the same year, but the two are generally regarded as a single novel.
Featuring a departure from the black comedy of his debut novel ''Harsh Generation'', Ruiner is presented as a fictional record by a man named Asbestos T. Fowler (who is credited as the author of the work), and features more than forty different narrators in a constantly changing array of voices with typographical variation, making the novel an example of postmodernism and ergodic literature.
Synopsis[edit]
Traversing two volumes and dozens of named characters, the narrative ostensibly focuses on Nihil, a black-hat hacker who is tasked by a mysterious man named Victor Herbst with finding a video titled "Ruiner," which is said to contain supernatural qualities, through the deep web. While initially presented as a stock horror narrative, the plot is fragmented by the end of the first act, with Nihil separating into two different individuals, with the latter version acting, in some ways, as the story's antagonist, despite the two never meeting. The majority of the text is overtaken by the musings of a serial killer named Somnus, who murders people at the behest of his imaginary friend, a skinless canine named Mr. Sprinkles, who at various points narrates the story itself, through a dense and dreamlike style. Afterwards, the plot goes to the second version of Nihil who is living with Nicolle, a mentally unstable artist, and works in the bio-cleaner industry, cleaning out the apartments of recently deceased individuals. He finds an apartment with a hole in the bathroom that leads to a room that’s not in the building’s plans, and from then a staircase that never ends appears. Along with his working-class friends, they create a website concerning the apartment and make vast sums of money out of viewers who want to experience “true horror.” He meets a mysterious woman named Violet, who the first Nihil may have been in love with, about seven years ago.
The staircase may end up leading to a vast underground cyberpunk world which might be larger than Earth. Then the plot goes back to the “original” Nihil, who finds a way to get to the video which includes breaking into a haunted mansion attraction and from there traversing a seemingly inoperative elevator to meet a sentient blob who announces itself to be God. Somnus meets a girl named Scarlet Gaunt, who also works for the alternate version of Nihil, but there is significant evidence presented that this person may be a figment of his imagination.
Random hints in the novel imply that none of the hundreds of named characters are discernible entities, and are in fact the same person, a man named Asbestos T. Fowler, credited as the novel's author. All of the characters’ narratives contradict each other, making it unclear what events actually transpire and which of them are imagined. The video is also sought by a death-worshipping cult, Guantanamo high-ranking officers, a girl who thinks she’s a Hindu goddess, a drug-addicted child prodigy working on an experimental novel, an Austrian immigrant who practices witchcraft, a hacker called the Frequenter who lives in a World War II bunker, a pair of Copenhagen-based gravediggers, a cyborg obsessed with the library of Alexandria, North Korean admirals, porn actresses and a duo of Berlin drug dealers, who inexplicably appear at various unconnected segments of the novel. The reader becomes a character themselves, being addressed as “You,” directly by the novel.
Eventually the narrative disintegrates entirely into a hallucinatory series of vignettes, with a person implied to be Nihil meeting with an obscure entity known only as "The Primarch," who bears some connection to both the video and the immense staircase, who urges Nihil to upload the video across mass communication systems and initiate an apocalyptic end event. The novel abruptly ends before Nihil makes his decision.
Themes & Devices[edit]
The novel features surreal, elaborate artwork, from Renaissance paintings to Dadaist collages and renditions of imagery commonly associated with the found-footage horror sub-genre. It also makes use of extensive typographical variation, featuring a large number of fonts and narrating styles, including blank and marbled pages, manga-styled excerpts, and narrations in prose poetry, haiku, film and theatrical scripts, as well as flash stories and minimalist, clinical prose.
Writing Style[edit]
The novel is broken into increasingly chaotic segments that switch from various topographical locations and characters in the present (circa 2015,) to the English Civil War, to Italy in the early eighties, a dark rendition of 1840’s American South, World War II Japan, 1990s North Korea, and to a dystopian version of Hollywood, as well as an unidentified futuristic dimension referred to only as The City, 10,000 years in the future, leaning to the novel's cyberpunk and speculative fiction style.
References[edit]
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