Danny King

I am going to preface this review with the thought that most of my readers know what “cancel culture” is. If you’re fortunate enough to be fuzzy on the concept, it involves the willful defamation and ostracization of a person who may or may not have made a statement offensive to self-righteous observers who lurk on the internet. These observer/judgers bloviate from their self-assigned “high ground.” By and large, these cowards operate in the toxic space of a fully public forum, show more while maintaining full anonymity. [End of preface.]

Danny King lambasts today’s cancel culture by envisioning its evolution into a strong-arm authoritarian regime in a future dystopian Britain — called “New Britannia.” Told from the viewpoint of Sienna, a 30-ish apparatchik of the New Britannic repressive regime, Cancelled contains such details as these: “A6” sexual consent applications, which must be reviewed by three “womyn” (plural of “womxn” (women)) before the applicant may pursue the object of his desires; all adult non-incarcerated people wear Smart Glasses, giving them access to the Network, which they can access and manipulate by blinking their eyes, and which ground them in the grid. The devices also allow the user to adjust their Vulnerability Condition, or VunCon, which limits what others can say to her or how they behave around her. These represent a bare sampling of the absurdities King includes in his compendium.

In fact, Sienna, or “Sinny,” works under cover as an Auditor, an investigator who brings cases for cancellation before the Auditing Oversight Congress. The author’s range of cancellable infractions is hilarious: a sea-going pirate DJ under investigation for broadcasting songs like Born a Womxn by Sandy Posey, for citing gender identity theory; Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run for its disability discrimination; King Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas for racism; and, among others, Baby, It’s Cold Outside by Dean Martin for its suggestion of rape. And I have to add one other example because it’s just so outlandish: since consuming animal flesh of any kind is strictly forbidden, a former butcher is investigated because a private communique between the (supposedly unrepentant) onetime meat cutter and his son concerned “bringing home the bacon”; at a private family barbecue held four years ago, he’d shaped various tofu, soya, and mycoprotein patties into shapes of outlawed meat cuts; etc, etc.

King devotes the early part of his novel establishing this too-fucked-up-to-be-amusing world, and paradoxically, the effect is hysterically funny. The satire is razor-sharp, damning, and aimed way too well to be anything less than devastating. However, dystopias being what they are, Sienna runs afoul of the highers-up, and the novel veers off into a brand new vivid and chilling direction, with Sienna at the receiving end of state persecution. I won’t deal very closely with this section, except to exhort the reader to pick this novel up, and experience the derring-do of its nail-biting plot. It’s as though King has yanked the blinkers off and we witness the logical end of his chosen theme: the real-life grinding of the state’s terrible machinery as it deals with its cancelled—and defenseless—undesirables.

King wields his observations of the cancel culture with devastating effect. He truly has mastered its absurdity while also warning of its Stalin-era tactics of state control. He demonstrates mastery of at least two types of story-telling in the one novel, and one comes away impressed that he could handle both as superbly as he did.

Take it up!

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I haven't been this ambivalent about a book since, oh, the onset of Quarantine Brain. My reading buddies and I wanted to prolong our baddie streak after finishing Hench. It turned out that The Henchmen's Book Club was what we thought we would get with Hench, only, you know, a little more regressive.

"But most of all, Bill just missed making a difference; even if that difference was invariably a terrifying plot that threatened to destabilise the entire free world. But like Bill said, it was show more just nice to be a part of something."

Mark Jones is a henchman in the Agency, one of the big employment agencies for supervillains. But despite steady work, it doesn't always pay well, and Mark's in debt to his father-in-law. As much as Mark would like to get out of the business, it's his only chance for a payday. The trouble is that the villains aren't all that interested in looking after their contracted employees and Mark keeps finding himself in hot water.

"Because loyalty’s a one-way street in this game, with often nothing more than broken promises, trap doors and piranha tanks waiting when it came time to paying the men who’d done the actual grafting."

So while Mark's standing around, he decides to start a book club with his fellow henches. It becomes a connection between some of the henches, although it is not without controversy: "The only serious danger I’d experienced was when I’d come perilously close to losing my nominating rights following some scandalously low scores for The Kenneth Williams Diaries."

The story is rather episodic, and for awhile, it was hard to parse out an overarching plot. It veers from one disastrous job to another. The humorous descriptions and asides were non-stop, and at times, exhausting. It should be noted that they were occasionally excessively juvenile, particularly a number of mentions of something being very "gay." An example: “Instead, I tried meditating my way to the surface. This sounds a bit gay, and I'll be the first to admit it, but it can actually save your life." Not only not really necessary, but I felt rather questionable coming from a guy who's reading books like The Time Traveler's Wife, The Client, Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Bodies, The Book of Illusions, and Beloved. Which--characters. I actually rather enjoyed how most of them were done, focusing on the henching, but adding a few details here and there to humanize them, especially Mr. Smith and Big Cat. The 'heroes' ended up being especially funny, with their imaginary takes on James Bond and an American Steven Segal-type action figure.

"'You're going to get us both killed, you great fuckwit!' I cringed, hardly daring to look over at the speedometer.
“Danger’s my middle name,” Tempest breezed.
“I never said danger. I said killed,” I pointed out. “And fuckwit.”

Honestly, I felt like this was a book in need of a strong editor. Take out a good forty pages of filler in the beginning, use the hench book club even more to create empathy, remove the tasteless 'gay' language, re-work descriptions of women so they don't automatically include the fuckability meter, and rework the problematic Africa section (or cut it), and it would be closer to a fun, four-star read. It would make a bankable difference between finishing this and wanting to try more of the author's works, both written and in screen. For now, I'll pass on further King.

Thanks to fellow henches: Nataliya, Stephen and jade show less

This book was a pleasant surprise. Having never read any of Danny King’s other works, I picked this solely on its quirky description – a reform school which teaches juvenile delinquent how to be BETTER criminals. Although I was initially concerned that tidbit would be a spoiler, it is included in the description on the copy I had, and pretty much right at the beginning it becomes clear what kind of school it is. One of my favorite parts – which I still chuckle over – is on the first show more day of the school, one of the students is told to empty his pockets in front of the class. He spills out drugs, cigarettes, a switchblade and pornographic playing cards. The teacher’s response is that he’s “clean”. The narrator’s response is something along the lines of “Clean?!?!? What the *#&%** are they looking for? Alien Embryos?” The dialog – although more off-color than my usual taste – is witty, intelligent and always original. King does an exceptional job developing the characters, and you quickly become invested in their welfare.

I listened to this title as an audiobook, and the British narration provided a unique component to the writing. It is based in London, and the students come from all walks and districts, and their accents as relayed by the audiobook proved a great bonus. Where dialect can sometimes be troublesome (or annoying) in print, the audiobook waded through all of it and created believable and surprisingly sympathetic characters. Highly Recommended. show less

Occasionally funny, but mostly just gratuitiously gorey. From the title I expected something wittier and less grim. The action isn't exciting enough to hold up its end of the book, and the characters are more like caricatures. Even the protagonist failed to garner my sympathy in spite of being by all accounts a flawed and sorry version of a hitman with a relateable angle.