I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

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 I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, by Jason Pargin

I found the title and cover a bit irresistible, even though I haven't gotten around to reading more of the John Dies at the End series.  

Abbott, your basic failing-to-launch guy with a Twitch channel, hates driving for Lyft.  Arriving at a Circle K to pick up a client for a trip to the LA airport, she shows him an old roadie box covered in stickers and offers him $200,000 in cash if he will drive her and it to Washington, DC in four days.  He's not allowed to see inside the box, he can't tell anyone, he must leave all trackable devices behind, but she promises it's not heroin and he'll have enough money to live on his own!  And so they head off to the highway.

Within a few hours, an ex-FBI officer, a biker thug, Abbott's dad, and the entirety of Reddit are on their tail and rumors are spreading faster than wildfire.  The box contains a dead body -- an alien -- a nuclear bomb -- a dead radioactive alien, and the travelers are Russian spies -- terrorists -- Nazis -- mind-controlled hostages, on their way to start a civil war or something.

Abbott and Ether, sans devices, are clueless about all this and so get to know each other a bit and talk about life, the universe, and everything why everyone is so miserable and the nature of the algorithms that trap us inside walls of fear and anger.  Is the black box of doom sitting in the trunk of the car, or do we all live inside it as we doomscroll ourselves to death?

It's a fun story, very anxiety-inducing, very accurate as to how Reddit works, and full of interesting thoughts about just what we are doing to ourselves.  Also I don't know if Jason Pargin has ever read DWJ but he has the same penchant for bringing everything together into one massively chaotic burst at the end. 

Comments

  1. Anne@HeadFullofBooksApril 17, 2025 at 5:21 PM

    I don't know how Reddit works but the title made me laugh if that counts for anything.

    ReplyDelete

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