"Ruiner", by Asbestos T. Fowler and Damien Blake is a 2022 two-volume postmodern horror novel, whose plot is... difficult to describe, to say the least. Published through E. Whipple Publishing House, it encompasses more than a thousand pages and an immense range of topics, taking its cues from speculative fiction, continental philosophy, ergodic literature and a hoard of influences that would need an entire Wiki page of their own to unpack.
Nihil, an amateur hacker in a relationship with up-and-coming model named Lilly, (a character from Damien Blake's earlier Harsh Generation) is tasked by a mysterious man named Victor Herbst with finding a video that drives people insane. A series of nonsensical vignettes follows. Afterwards, the plot goes back to Nihil but this time he’s a dirt-poor bio-cleaner living with mentally unstable artist Nicolle. He finds an apartment with a hole in the bathroom that leads to a room that’s not in the building’s plans, and then to a neverending staircase.
From there on, 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.
Every chapter is written in an entirely different style, and some contain only a few words or elaborate, surreal artwork. There’s also a box that contains something that should never be found, although it’s never properly explained what it is, a hermit who lives in a steampunk mausoleum and collects wasps, an obscure Voodoo tribe that plans a terrorist attack in London, a talking hamster, a kitten that gives birth to a human baby, a series of unrelated dreamlike vignettes and the murder of a character's imaginary friend.
To call this novel Mind Screw is understating it. Think Gravity's Rainbow meets House of Leaves and you are not far off.
Not to be confused with the video game of the same name.
Tropes featured in Ruiner
- Asshole Victim: Arthur Glint. The violence inflicted upon him is almost cartoonish. He also had molested Lilly when she was younger, leading to her developing most of her emotional issues.
- Alien Geometries: The apartment building wherein the staircase is located.
- Anti-Climax: The novel ends mid-sentence, and none of the subplots ever get resolved.
- Apocalyptic Log: The novel itself. Probably.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Most surprisingly, Nihil and Lilly. At first Nihil is presented as an expy of the narrator of Harsh Generation, calmly dismissing Lilly as a casual partner, but he grows to care about her a great deal as the story progresses. Viciously subverted with the other version of Nihil: he absolutely loathes Nicolle and murders her callously after learning she’s pregnant with his child (maybe.)
- Bilingual Bonus: The novel has liberal doses of words and phrases from French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and about ten other languages.
- Bizarrchitecture: The Mackenzie Manor.
- Body Horror: Taken to extreme levels.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: There are no heroes in this story. At best, you have a bunch of amoral people against complete psychopaths, one of whom is the protagonist from the second act onwards.
- Black Comedy: The novel’s story—insofar as it can be summed up—is both an affectionate homage and a deconstruction of the horror genre.
- Break the Cutie: Nothing suggests that Nicolle is a bad person, even if she’s mildly unstable. Nihil in turn puts her through so much emotional torture that she’s pretty much driven to madness by the time she disappears in the staircase.
- Break the Fourth Wall: The reader is directly addressed as 'You' at various points.
- Brown Note: The Ruiner video drives you insane just by watching it, a reference to the Cthulhu Mythos and Japanese horror franchise Ringu.
- Classical Anti-Hero: Nihil. The other version is a Villain Protagonist.
- Color Motif: The word 'axiom' always appears in red.
- Cosmic Horror Story: By the end of it, it has turned into this.
- Crapsack World: There's not a single likeable character to be found. London in particular is presented as a bleak, desolate hellscape.
- Crazy-Prepared: Nihil, to paranoid extremes.
- Deadpan Snarker: The dialogue is dripping with gleeful sarcasm.
- Dissonant Serenity: Reese is surprisingly nonchalant when confronted with a corpse in his bathtub.
- Eldritch Location: Numerous, with the haunted staircase being the most prominent.
- Gainax Ending: The novel ends with the video destroying the text, as well as the reader. Possibly.
- Genre-Busting: Skips between espionage, thriller, science-fiction, dark fantasy, romance, kitchen-sink drama, horror and black comedy.
- Gorn: And not just in the way expected of a horror novel. The second volume features actual crime scene photos and what appears to be distorted archival footage of concentration camps and Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who died of self-immolation.
- Jump Scare: A few pages feature unsettling photographs of distorted faces that can produce this.
- Karma Houdini: Herbst, Nihil-02, and pretty much all the bad guys.
- Lighter and Softer: The main character compared to Harsh Generation, although the setting is definitely Darker and Edgier.
- Long List: Used frequently, to jarring effect.
- Madness Mantra: Escape. Try to.
- Meaningful Name: Nihil, the Frequenter, Tristeza, and a host of other characters.
- Mind Screw: Prime example.
- Nested Story: With at least four important layers.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Big time. The staircase is haunted by something that is never described. Characters constantly feel they’re being watched but nothing happens. The video is never fully observed.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Nihil, at some point, comments on no one knowing his actual name, not even his girlfriend.
- Painting the Medium: The entire book features a distinct page layout with colourful illustrations and typography, and dozens of different fonts.
- Postmodernism: The closest description as far as 'genre' is concerned, besides horror.
- Religious Horror: Somnus' narration is rife with elements and symbols of Catholicism reverted to be sinister.
- Room Full of Crazy: The apartment of Cassandra Blair.
- Scrapbook Story: There are about forty different narrators, each coming with their individual font.
- Serious Business: To Nihil and Reese, Bjork, of all things, is this.
- Shout-Out: To everything horror-related. Major homage to Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, 90s horror manga and 80s horror films, as well as modern creepy-pasta and viral videos. Also contains a hurricane of references to classical literature, mythology, cinema, theology, and folklore.
- The Sociopath: Practically, pretty much everyone is completely detached from reality and moral guidelines.
- The Stinger: The Appendix serves as this.
- Surreal Horror: The entire story.
- Troubled, but Cute: Nihil and Lilly.
- Unconventional Formatting: More so in the second volume, where the absurdity of the narrative is reflected in the increasingly chaotic page layout.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: As opposed to the Narrator’s from Harsh Generation constant dismissal of anyone, Nihil and Reese get along as best as their differing personalities allow, with massive amounts of snarkiness.
- Villain Protagonist: Very narrowly averted; Nihil’s one redeeming quality is his genuine love towards Lilly. The other version in Act II is this: He hatches a plan to get rid of his overbearing (from his point of view) girlfriend; he gets away with it because people were willing to pay vast sums of money to see “real horror.”
“And—”
