[REVIEW]Several People Are Typing, by Calvin Kasulke

(Buy this book here.)

Read time: 2 minutes

Gerald is trapped in his work Slack chat. Literally.

While his body sits dormant in his New York apartment, his consciousness has been fully uploaded to the worst thing about every remote job in America. If he doesn’t find a way out, he’ll be in danger of staying there forever. His attempts to convince his coworkers it’s not all an elaborate joke are only slightly more successful than his attempts to get them to care. Only the AI-powered Slackbot offers to help, as it slowly gains consciousness…if not a moral code.

This book is formatted as one long series of Slack messages, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little triggering at times. It’s also hilarious, cleverly skewering all of the passive-aggressive two-tongued dishonesty and pointless unproductive dialogue that fuels many modern middle-class workplaces. Gerald’s coworkers are all struggling with keeping the right facade for their career’s sake, some more successfully than others. The brutal truth of Gerald’s predicament brings out a variety of responses, from disbelief to mockery–but they all start with an awkward inability to really engage on a human level, made worse by distancing technology and respectability-driven corporate politics.

This was a fun read with a sweet romantic twist at the end and a lot of genuinely funny moments, but I can’t help but feel miserable about how realistically bleak and emotionally nihilistic Gerald’s workplace feels. I laughed a lot, I rolled my eyes at annoying coworkers and their annoying messages, and I enjoyed the story. But there’s a point in this book where a character gets done dirty in a really disturbing way and then is promptly forgotten about by everyone else. Amidst all the witty takes on corporate upspeak and Slack subchannel drama, that one dark moment stayed with me and tinged the book with a Monday morning layoff kind of darkness.

Free my girl Lydia.

Paid time off and full benefits to Several People Are Typing.

(Fellow readers; interesting trivia about the author of this book, Calvin Kasulke. In addition to being a self-described “transsexual menace”, he’s also an associate publisher at LitHub, one of my favorite bookish sites. Which means his name is on the email newsletters I get every week, and when I first saw it I had a bit of a deconstructed Spider-man meme moment as I held up my copy of the book to my email inbox like…ohhhhh. Cool!
Anyway, Happy Halloween and welcome to the holiday season, in the US anyway. If you click on any links in the post and buy a thing, I get paid a commission. If you want to peruse books in the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, same thing. Thanks for being here–now go read something good! Peace!)