Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

Operating like a pendant to Mike Carrao’s Desert Tiles, 404 Error: memoir of a nobody, by RG Vasicek & Zak Ferguson is about a schlub named Darius and his interactions with a rogue AI. This glitch in the matrix, the 404 Error, takes on a life of its own. The short novel shifts between comedy and horror, commentary and meta-commentary, wetware and meatspace. The battle between Darius and the AI are interspersed with Darius’s online rants and self-referential episodes (he’s currently reading Louis Armand’s Vampyr). Imagine if David Cronenberg directed a remake of Freaky Friday or a more intense body-swapping episode of Legion.

The Sixties and Seventies had Hunter S. Thompson speaking home truths out of a fever dream of Las Vegas slot machines and a briefcase full of illegal drugs. Vasicek and Ferguson, a similar Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo combo, seek the same truths, this time in the media-saturated, smartphone-obsessed postmodern End-of-History dystopia we call modern life. 404 Error rides the line between nightmare and farce, one small sidestep or wrong move will lead you either laughing or screaming.

“The faces we make. Anthropomorphic desires. Machinic desires. Thumb-drives in our asses.”