Literature / LoLo Apollo: I'm Afraid of Americans

You'll live forever tonight.

"Oh-no, we gotta go
We're not gonna live forever
Why, why we gotta die?
You know that we'll be together
Hey, hey, we gotta say
I could never be a savior
I know that you'll miss me
But I'm never, never, never coming home."

— Butthole Surfers, "Dracula From Houston"

Brother, I have a HELL of a cough. Can I interest you in a TV Tropes page?

LoLo Apollo: I'm Afraid of Americans is a 2022 novel by Nicola Jonesy.

A deeply weird Conspiracy Thriller, it is set in a world not dissimilar to our own (professional wrestling, OutKast, and Dunhill cigarettes all feature), with a few, odd divergences (immortal people exist and the world is generally accepting of this, a seven-foot-tall woman with a skull face is a Red Eye correspondant, and the names of some movies and their featured actors are different). Taking place after the long-incoming fall of a fictional counterpart to the Soviet Union, the Hypervirginian Union of Socialist States (HUSS), the CIA has become a pressure cooker of self-devouring ideations, presently using covert radicalization and false flag operations to keep the remnants of the HUSS destabilized; a paranoid gambit intended to weaken the fractured power carried out under the guise of post-fall reconstruction and international aid.

The book's central character is Bob Dracula — a severely depressed, unstable, and direly underqualified intelligence contractor working for Pumpkin Hill, the largest free-market spy agency in North America. Despite being unfit for duty in almost every regard, his employers continue to send him into the field for one reason: Bob Dracula is unconditionally immortal, minimizing his incentive to relent to capture and negating the chance of a body turning up on foreign soil. He's a great favorite of the CIA, who intend to contract him to covertly train anti-annexation radicals in the Uvoginian-Kuroginian International Zone. When Bob, in a rare stroke of conscience, refuses to take the contract, his handler (and adoptive mother) Vampire — Pumpkin Hill's ancient, enigmatic, Cockney-accented spymaster — is forced to break a promise and once again perform the procedure she used long ago to sever Bob's tether to mortality.

Much to Bob's disgust and outrage, Vampire has created another immortal agent and sent him in his stead. But when the new agent goes missing on the mission Bob was meant to accept, he agrees to travel to Interzone to track him down. There, amongst isolated villagers growing loathe of the international interest in their region and a nomad tribe with a strange, spiritual connection to the steppe land and its soil, Bob searches for his MIA charge, hoping, if nothing else, for a chance to "meet another freak that can't die". However, when his investigation puts him on the path of Filament Ugo, a naive, young religious functionary from an indigenous herder tribe of anthropomorphic goat monsters, Bob finds himself falling deep in infatuation with the boy, inciting a series of incidents that will test Bob's already-strained psyche, force him to question his devotion to his country and his agency family, and maybe even destroy the United States of America...

The book can be purchased here.

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Now — how about those tropes? Let's shake on it:

• Affably Evil:
  • "People tended to be very fond of Vampire once they had spoken to her."
  • While "evil" might be too strong a word, Igor is surprisingly hospitable and courteous to Bob, all things considered.
• Ambiguous Situation: Was Filament's murder a product of Bob's neglect of his mental illness reaching a peak, or was Nick Trophy influencing his mind and working through him? Bob himself seems unsure.
• Ambiguous Time Period: Suggested to take place in the late 2010s, but it's made ambiguous by the noted absence of the Internet in this world, the late dissolution of a counterpart to the Soviet Union, and the arrested development of digital technology.
• Arc Words: Quite a few.
  • "I'll show you the helplessness of the human heart."
  • "You don't eat when you've lived too long."
  • The syllable "Lo" is a near-constant motif and is ultimately tied into the Hawaiian concept of "Lolo" — a time "at which a man's shadow has entered his head".
  • "Is there anything that I could do?"
• Ax-Crazy: Nick Trophy admires the violence of beasts and savors any opportunity he can to revel in the sporting and aesthetic appreciation of murder.
• Badass Preacher: Old Zabri was a jolly, whiskey-drinking, professional wrestling fanatic — universally beloved by his flock and almost everyone in Southwestern Bell Town. Even Beetle, who rarely has a nice thing to say about anyone, was in awe of Zabri's zest for life and natural charisma.
• Big Bad: In a story full of bad guys, Nick Trophy takes the cake, being responsible for many of the interventionist actions taken by both the heroes and the lesser antagonists.
• Break the Cutie:
  • It seems like Bob was a sweet kid, once. Then he beat a classmate of his to death for stomping out a boy he had a crush on. After this, something turned off in his brain and it never turned back on.
  • Holden Cooley — figuratively and literally.
• Bullying a Dragon: That's right, Redford. Keep talking down to the ancient, vampire-siring demon who likely founded your organization. See what happens.
• Cast Full of Gay:
  • Many of the book's principal characters are implied or outright stated to be queer, with Bob, Filament, Vanilla, Loser, and Ridley confirmed to be gay. Halloween Jack could also qualify, if his flirtatious teasing towards Bob is taken at face value.
  • Beetle notes that homosexuality is common amongst the Urduk, due to a lack of a cultural taboo in their society.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: By the end of his stay in Interzone, Bob thinks very little of discovering the remnants of a United States-constructed Gas Chamber hidden inside of a relay station. He's seen his country do much worse.
• Contemplate Our Navels: Bob routinely gets lost in his own thoughts, usually after a dire revelation or when his mental health is in the toilet. His constant overthinking and prolonged attempts at defining an identity, keeping him in his own head all the time, are likely a contributing factor to his emotional instability and depression.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Whatever Nick Trophy really is, be it a warped human being or something much older that merely assimilated the face of one, he is still down in the pit, and one day he will come out of the pit, and on that day, he will reign as a wild, black pharaoh for eight billion years. Once Nick makes himself known, the tone of the book darkens immensely and its focus on political commentary and the nations and struggles of insignificant, little men wanes.
• Cowboy Cop: Bob in the colloquial sense, Igor in the literal sense.
  • From the moment of his deployment in Interzone, Bob is getting intoxicated on the job, throwing his weight around, and — as noted by Vanilla — itching for a chance to use his sidearm.
  • Igor a.k.a. Special Agent Werewolf D. Drismire is an American culture fetishist who literally dresses like a cowboy as he keeps law and order in Southwestern Bell Town. Despite this, he scolds and derides Bob Dracula for his field conduct, calling him out on the sort of bullying American policing that his countrymen have come to resent.
• Devil in Disguise: Vampire is all but directly stated to be this:
  • Vampire is a brilliantly-white, clearly inhuman creature with a pronounced serpentine look, being fanged, hairless, and having no nose or ears.
  • Vampire is known to be very old. As far as Bob's knowledge goes, she's been around since the 1500s at minimum. She's later described teaching early man to build temples and make sacrifices, confirming that she's about as old as humanity.
  • Vampire is described as having fallen from the sky, "phosphorescent and burning", and as having "lain, howling and enraged, on the cracked salt" after hitting the ground, sounding very much like an account of Lucifer being cast from Heaven.
  • Vampire works diligently in the dark, manipulating people and nations, all for the professed goal of ensuring that everything "would fall into the perfect stasis of Order, and would be controlled, and there would be nothing that would not be controlled", sounding a great deal like a usurper of God, coveting dominion over a Creation they were denied a part in.
• Downer Ending: The world has frozen over and America as a country no longer exists. Bob Dracula is a delusional, helpless, mad king, pitied by his family and his subjects. Filament is dead and it's implied that Dracula abandoned a portion of the Urduk tribe to die in the freeze as revenge against Ganvenden Ugo for denying him his blessing to have Filament resurrected as a vampire. Merry Christmas, everyone!
• Enforced Cold War: The United States is trying to keep the post-Soviet states at each others' throats to prevent the Hypervirginian Union from reforming. Considering that both superstates end up completely destroyed, unable to ever reform... they succeeded.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • While Bob (at least at the start of the book) isn't evil per say, he's still implied to be a manipulator, and the seeds of sociopathy that will later result in his Face–Heel Turn are definitely present. Despite his dysfunction, radicalizing and arming farmers in Eastern Europe on behalf of the CIA is still a bridge too far.
  • Vampire and the other CIA agents seem to find Director Redford's jingoistic grandstanding and overt racism contemptible.
• Expy:
  • Loser D. Tuanis is based on Lapis Lazuli from Steven Universe — from her blue skin, to her aloof demeanor, to her control over water, up to and including her ability to create aqueous wings that she uses to fly and her "water witch" epithet.
  • Vampire, with her skeletal face, protruding fangs, noted British accent, twee demeanor, and fondness for red-and-green lollipops, is a dead-ringer for Calliope from Homestuck.
  • Igor is based on two Troy Baker characters:
    • His origin in his setting's equivalent to the Soviet Union, fondness for revolvers and western-wear, and his status as a Double Reverse Quadruple Agent are clear references to Revolver Ocelot from Metal Gear.
    • The skull mask he wears to the Saturday evening service and his servitude to a motherly death god invoke Higgs from Death Stranding.
  • Filament, of Ralsei from Deltarune — both being adorable, bespectacled goat-boy clerics.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Beetle uses a flamethrower to light the bonfire at the steppe church service. He later uses it to kill Halloween Jack and torch the camp radio to keep Bob from evacuating from Interzone.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • The book is, in part, a modern retelling of the origin of Count Dracula, at least the one depicted in Bram Stoker's Dracula:
    • Bob Dracula is a soldier sent to a foreign land to protect the interests of his nation.
    • Someone he loves dearly is lost in the conflict, causing him to rage against the powers he served and turn against them.
    • Bob Dracula rejects his humanity and installs himself as a nobleman, casting a dark shadow over the territory under his control.
    • Many years in the future, the now-christened Lord Dracula reigns undisputed over a desolate land of monsters, ready and willing to expand his influence beyond the borders of his nation.
  • Holden Cooley was an orphan groomed into a tool of the state by his adoptive mother, Vampire. When he was fatally burned by the detonation of a fertilizer bomb, she performed an untested alchemical procedure to sever his ties to mortality, creating the first of the immortal humans that would later bear her name. Being the first time she had ever attempted such an operation, it didn't go as planned. Ashamed of her failure, Vampire had Holden's still-cognizant remains stored at an abandoned CIA black site in Kuroginia, where his consciousness expanded beyond the putrefied remains of his physical body, assimilated the legends of the Maíruda trickster god through the collective unconscious, and became Nick Trophy, a sapient, scheming cancer that would, decades later, spread as an infection throughout the spirit of the land and threaten all of humanity.
• Genius Loci:
  • Interzone itself seems to have a will of its own, projected via the Steppe Giant, a skyscraper-sized clay man that looms motionless over the plains, its dormant face twisting into a silent scream of rage when the land is in pain or danger.
  • Nick Trophy's presence, being the Devil in the Soil, is implied to have affected the "mind" of the steppe and those who live upon it. While his consciousness exists, the land churns and seeps crude oil. Ganvenden Ugo describes the steppe as having "calmed" once Nick is exorcised.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Vampire. To a lesser extent, Anonymous Bosch, a largely-unseen businessman with personal ties to Vampire and Vanilla von Dirge. In the epilogue, it's revealed that Vampire was working with him to kickstart the Mercenary Age.
• Gruesome Goat: Filament states that the Urduk were this in the time of Vlad Dracula — a fearsome race of goat monsters that earned the voivode's favor when they emerged from underneath the Carpathian mountains and attacked Uvoginian emissaries on the road through their territory. In recent centuries, they've mellowed considerably.
• I Hate You, Vampire Dad: Bob is not taking immortality well; the idea that he is now obligated to serve Vampire forever because she extracted his precious thing and now personally possesses it keeps him in mental agony. It's implied that his torment is so severe that he would have killed himself several times over if he could.
• I Love You, Vampire Son: Vampire is explicitly motherly and affectionate towards Bob and claims to have been so towards Holden as well. Holden inversely claims that Vampire had him buried alive after she botched his turning and there's evidence to suggest that both accounts are true.
• Late to the Tragedy: When Bob pursues Nick into the ruins of an old CIA outpost in Interzone, he uncovers overwhelming evidence of an ethnic cleansing carried out by the United States during the Cold War, including multilingual signposts directing persons to an oversized communal shower and a "Maternity Ward" consisting of a small, concrete room with a hole in the floor. He doesn't stop to reflect, though; finding Nick is his priority.
• Looks Like Cesare: Invoked. Bob is described as such, once No Immortal Inertia starts kicking in.
  "His face ash-white, lanky frame draped in a baggy, black sweater, his dark hair oily and plastered to his forehead, Bob looked for all the world like the ghoul somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. His mouth took up too much of the real estate of his face as he grinned in uncontrollable spasms. His eyes were pus-yellow and sunken into the centers of dark, maroon circles. He was beginning to look like what he really was: a dead shell, being remote-controlled at a distance."
• Looks Like Orlok: Vampire is tall, gaunt, completely hairless, alabaster-skinned, and has long, bony fingers and protruding, curved fangs.
• Mad Scientist: Vanilla van (sorry, Von) Dirge, a Marlayan ex-university student, run out of every accredited institution under the sun for her obsession with raising the dead. Presently living as an expatriate in Interzone due to their lax grave robbing laws, working out of an old pillbox bunker converted into a laboratory/living space described as "the very platonic ideal of a Hollywood mad scientist's lair". She's obsessed with "branding" and only ever wears ridiculous goggles and labcoats, regardless of her present climate.
• Meaningful Name: Nick Trophy — fitting alias for a primordial god of chaos. The name is meaningful by design. Vampire assigned the name to Holden Cooley before she turned him loose on the world as her agent of chaos. It was just happy coincidence that he later merged with Nyarlathotep.
• Mind Rape: Holden Cooley's radio broadcast fries Bob's brain. He begin developing flu-like symptoms and running a high fever, his worst traits are turned up to eleven, and No Immortal Inertia starts kicking in, reducing him to the gaunt, monstrous state, closer resembling a traditional vampire, that he remains in for the remainder of the book. Granted, it's ambigious how responsible the broadcast was for his mental and physical breakdown, and how much of it was Go Mad from the Revelation.
• Monster Mash: Almost every central character has a motif revolving around a classic movie monster or Halloween staple:
  • Vampire, Nosferatu.
  • Bob Dracula. Just take a guess.
  • Gilman D. Drismire a.k.a. Beetle. Named after the Gill-man, thematically closer to The Renfield. Fitting, considering the latter's association with insects.
  • Werewolf D. Drismire a.k.a. Igor. Again, guess. His enabling of Vanilla's grave robbing habit fits with his undercover alias.
  • Vanilla von Dirge.
  • Loser D. Tuanis.
  • LoLo Zombie.
  • Halloween Jack.
  • Filament, with his black fur, pink eyes, and horns, evokes a traditional demonic or a Satanic image, though he's actually quite nice.
  • Nick Trophy, a shadowy, nightmare presence that delights in fear and moves through dreams, evokes the Bogeyman.
• The Nicknamer: Why, Nick Trophy, of course! He starts calling Bob "Leatherface" once Bob begins wearing Mankind's mask, and refers to Vampire as "Queen Bitch" or "Dolorossa", and Filament, bizarrely, as "Prince of Onion Flowers". He's also fond of "brother" and "buddy", both in and out of his Troy Phinks guise.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • Bob Dracula is described as looking uncannily like a young Jack Nicholson.
  • His agency rival, Francis Drake, resembles Dennis Hopper — part of an ongoing Easy Rider allusion within Pumpkin Hill.
  • Halloween Jack is very obviously meant to resemble David Bowie. The name's even a reference.
• No Indoor Voice: Nick Trophy's speech, unless he's speaking through someone, is always rendered in Small Caps! He's described as SHOUTING inside the heads of those he is in communication with!
• Not Using the "V" Word: Played with. By the end of the book, Vampire's immortal thralls have become known as "vampires" due to their publicized association with their creator. Justified, in that vampire fiction does not seem to exist in-universe, and Vlad Dracula is referenced only as an obscure historical figure]].
• Private Military Contractors:
  • Pumpkin Hill is a private spy agency that routinely takes contracts from the U.S. Government and isn't above armed operations and assassinations.
  • By the end of the book, thanks to Anonymous Bosch and Vampire's machinations, the world is overrun with mercenary companies and a new war economy, backed by a digital currency developed by Bosch, is flourishing — all according to plan.
• Reference Overdosed: Nicola Jonesy is a child of the internet of the 2000s/early 2010s; the book is laden with references to Homestar Runner, Homestuck, and various memes, as well as later works that achieved online followings, such as Steven Universe, Over the Garden Wall, and Undertale. There's also plentiful Professional Wrestling nods, references to real political figures and events, references to the culture and history of Romania, and extensive citing of Christian and Gnostic theology.
• Shout-Out:
  • Multiple, to the Cum Town podcast:
    • Bob tells Loser she looks like Stavros Halkias after she loses a tooth.
    • Vampire goes on Fox News's Red Eye program and is seated next John Bolton, just as Nick Mullen was in an episode.
    • Director Redford's nebbish aide is named Friedland.
  • Bob Dracula is described as walking like Lupin III while high on secobarbital.
  • Brent Halligan from The Mystery of the Druids cameos, having been promoted from Scotland Yard to working for British Intelligence.
  • Vampire's Dupont lighter is a reference to Sanji's from One Piece. Bob's Zippo is Strong Bad's iconic BMW lighter.
  • References to David Bowie and Miracle Musical abound.
  • The film Loser describes, Druidi, is a clear reference to The Wicker Man (1973).
  • "What protector of this land was ever so great as Dracula, whose blood flows in these veins?"
  • Nyarlathotep is mentioned in the Urduk scripture, being a healer and fortune teller who emigrated from ancient Egypt to Eurasia with his cult. He's believed by Maíruda practitioners to be the origin of the Devil in the Soil myths.
• The Social Darwinist:
  • Nick Trophy's endgame seems to be in service of this, attaining an indestructible body and inciting a nuclear war, all so he can return humanity to an animalistic survival state.
    "He would drag them all down into the pit, and he would reorder the system so that nothing could exist within order. All the chaos, and the violence of beasts, would be ensured as part of the code then, and Death, in Nick’s Earthly Kingdom, would be the Exalted Mother — hated, feared, and yet, unerringly served."
  • Anonymous Bosch and Vampire/Calamity/Death fit the bill as well, working to create a lawless era of pirates and mercenaries, maximizing individual freedom and cultivating "a Stronger World". Considering Vampire's previously-stated desire to force everything in Creation into "the perfect stasis of Order", the two may not be 100% on the same page.
• Sweet Sheep:
  • Darling Filament Ugo — a gentle goat boy who has just taken on the role of his village's spiritual leader.
  • The Urduk in general — a race of nomadic, humanoid goat creatures — are only ever depicted in a positive light. Every Urduk who features in the book is patient, hospitable to strangers, and compassionate. The nomads are a small group — totally at peace with themselves, their society, and their place in the world, putting them at odds with the paranoid and endlessly unsatisfied American CIA.
• Token Good Teammate: Francis Drake just wants to drink a beer and catch the Mets game; spycraft is just a 9-to-5 to him, unlike his more ambitious coworkers and handler, who are busying themselves with trying to seize control of various nations for various ideological reasons. Drake is also noticeably affectionate towards Vampire in the manner of a dutiful son, earnestly complimenting her piano-playing, attempting to soothe her anxieties before the meeting with the CIA director, and tending to her wounds as soon as she returns from the tunnels under Southwestern Bell Town. Given that it's likely that he was another orphan she adopted and groomed into spycraft, he's certainly far less resentful and hostile towards her than the others.
• Übermensch: It can be said that at some point, Bob begins seeing himself as this. It can also be said that despite whatever Bob, in his limited view of the world, thinks of himself, that Vampire fits the bill much better.
• Uncanny Village: Southwestern Bell Town. The locals are friendly enough, but it's completely isolated, monitored by a colossal clay golem that points and screams when the land is agitated, and governed by a localized theocracy based around Maíruda, an extremely niche, region-specific spiritual practice revolving around saint-worship and masks.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: The source of most of Bob's misery. He hasn't been alive that long, but the thought of living forever, forever being a tool of war, tethered to the battlefield, is existentially crushing him into a pulp.

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