Commoditizing the Starkian
For those who do not know, Stark Truth podcaster and tireless self-promoter Robert Stark “is an American journalist and political commentator. You can listen to his podcast at Doubleyou Doubleyou Doubleyou Dot Stark Truth Radio Dot Com.” He is also something of a guerrilla litterateur, and the publication of Vaporfornia , Stark’s sequel to 2017’s Journey to Vapor Island , constitutes an underground literary event. His preoccupations in Vaporfornia , which focuses on a different protagonist but elaborates on the world created in Journey (while also overlapping with Matthew Pegas’s Dragon Day ), will be familiar to Stark’s audience, with retrofuturism, neon, Jewesses, anuses, incels, and California all zoned for ambitious development in the author’s imagination. Stark’s new novel follows aspiring reporter and social justice warrior Max von Mueller, a troubled young man torn between defeatism and grandiose visions, woke ideology and the eugenic revolutionism of utopia-dreaming bil...