Make Sure You Die Screaming

An absurdist dark comedy about self-destructive masculinity in America. Born at the nexus of MAGA politics, transgender rights, and Faulkneian family drama, and the irreverent satire indebted to Twain and Vonnegut, there is the opportunity for a road trip from Chicago to nowhere Arkansas fueled by a Hunter S. Thompson worthy quantity of drugs and alcohol and self-deception. In a delightful inversion, the political becomes personal as the narrator struggles to manage the changes in their life, for instance they've recently abandoned their name but not yet selected a new one. Their entire life, career and family relationships are in similarly violent transition.
"This country is fucked and I refuse to let it fuck me gently."

Make Sure You Die Screaming had its ups and downs. At times, the story got very caught up in the zany catastrophe of these two asshole characters doing weird and shitty things. The MC was self-destructing and taking everyone they ran into down with them, and their new partner in crime sat somewhere between manic pixie dream girl energy and rich bitch who fucks around with people because she'll never see any consequences. Sometimes I could enjoy the rubbernecking, other times it got tiresome. That was mixed in with deeper content as the MC dealt with their grief over their dead friend and reckoned with their relationship with their parents. This content had some standout moments, though in other areas it felt incomplete. The gendered show more experiences of the main character, who has just come to terms with being nonbinary, rang very true even in the little moments of being read in certain ways with strangers. I connected with them when their latent gender feelings boiled over when their company started requiring pronouns in email signatures, and the frustration they felt not knowing whether to lie, come out, or compromise. And of course, this performative "inclusion" was contrasted with their partner at the firm, their closest friend and occasional lover, telling them to stay in the closet because being a "man" is what they need to keep climbing the corporate ladder (plus probably her own feelings about loving someone who isn't a man). It captured both the pain of rejection from the one person you thought wouldn't do that to you and the uncertainty of knowing that even in an environment that puts on airs of progressiveness and acceptance, coming out is likely to fuck with your future.
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Also, as the MC got closer to their hometown and started thinking about their mother as an actual person and not just an accessory to their father, their insights about their family dynamic, living with a conspiracy theorist conservative as a queer person, did get more interesting, though I think it didn't quite come together at the very end. The synopsis promised class commentary that I don’t think the text really fleshed out as much as I expected. Yeah, poor rural whites flock towards white-supremacy and conspiracies in part because they’re getting fucked over and are trapped in an environment that’s beating them down. And running from that might make someone who can’t squeeze themself into that culture both all too eager to be a corporate dog and feel displaced in both cultures. It presented those ideas plainly, but didn't interrogate them or do anything that would make those ideas feel fresh or poignant within the story. Maybe it would feel more insightful if these were new ideas to me and not something I could see by going outside. The ending really drew my eye to that. The woods-dwelling off-the-grid types that the MC meets at the very end -- the people who embody what the MC's father was all about and what their childhood was steeped in -- were barely people. There was the shitty cliche of the creepy mentally ill man, and that was the only character there that was distinct. Nothing felt particularly real or well developed to the people or the environment of the MC's hometown once they got there, which kind of flattened the idea that this was about class relations to more being family drama and childhood trauma.
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Frankly, it also felt weird to have the white MC come to terms with where they came from and that culture, and even feel some fond feelings for it when it's explicitly steeped in vitriolic racism. Like racism was used to paint the picture of the kind of far-right conspiracy theorists the MC's dad and his group were, but only treated as set dressing, not an actual issue the MC should think about when they're reconnecting with their family and their past. The MC was self-absorbed and not a great person, so it can be justified as part of their character, but I don't know if that's a good enough explanation. show less