A reunion of a group of friends looms on the horizon of Awful People, the new novel by Scott Mitchel May. The friends, whose lives once loosely revolved around employment at the Antiquated Brewing Company in Madison, Wisconsin, haven’t seen each other since 2009, their ties shattered after one of their number developed LSD-induced telekinetic and murdered her husband during what would become the group’s final party together. Except he might not even be dead. The reunion, as multiple interrogation room scenes lead us to realize, is not going to be a friendly affair, but something that happens deep in an underground government bunker.
Yet the book mostly focuses on the ordinary lives the friends have lived in the intervening years: one goes viral for Too Soon Radio, a YouTube channel where he posts acoustic songs commemorating the deaths of D-list celebrities. Another becomes a cult comic, half feral. One quits drinking and rises through the ranks of the state Democratic Party, another finds only divorce and a job hunting down student loan debtors.
Reunion novels tend to ask questions about how our lives take us off in different directions—how some of us make it, some of us don’t, and how it’s never quite who we expect. Awful People isn’t interested in asking, much less answering, these questions, maybe because no one really rises all that far: the Democrat wonk goes from working out of a former chicken coop with a compost toilet to missing a major promotion due his patron’s involvement in a bipartisan fentanyl overdose scandal; the YouTube star is far outshined by his own comment section.
We also get a lot on the Federal Paranormal/Psychological Investigation Bureau which has taken custody of Molly, the stabber with psychic powers, and employs another of the friends as an agent.
The idea of a secretive federal department tasked with exploring the paranormal has been around since The X-Files and commonplace since Hellboy, and there’s nothing new here in terms of the genre aspect, but these sections are worth it for their strange flights into Office Space mode, ignoring the plot to explore the culture of the bureaucracy: on Tuesdays the Bureau’s cafeteria offers “fried chicken so good you’d slap your mama for some,” and agents line up early because they accidentally ran out once, years ago. The sections exploring the agency’s past are a mixed bag: there’s a scene set in the agency’s prehistory with LBJ that feels a bit too removed from the rest of the novel, but the bit about the Paranormal Bureau being the brainchild of noted astrology lover Nancy Reagan is inspired.
Really the entire genre aspect of the novel feels somewhat unnecessary, the author’s hedge against a worry that no one wants to follow a bunch of dirtbags around Wisconsin. The dirtbags aren’t lovable—they’re awful people, the book is aptly titled—but they’re so well drawn that I was ready to follow them anywhere: trying to come up with a new standup bit during a smoke break, watching it bomb on stage, blatantly cheating a community college exam, suffering through the cheap version of a medical procedure due to a lack of insurance, or even just spending an afternoon on the couch wasted on oxycontin and anti-anxiety meds while watching Seventh Heaven for the fifth time––originally to “objectify the young Jessica Biel, but not anymore. Now he was in it purely for the wholesome moralizing and the repetitive narrative structure, which was comforting to his real soul.” Wholesome enough, our dirtbag feels, that it can withstand its star’s outing as a sexual predator.
Awful People takes long detours to explore not just the dirtbags but people only tangentially connected to them—the naïve father of a woman under a mountain of student debt, the YouTube reaction to a viral sensation, the actually-quite-well-endowed Dickless Jones who breaks his arm and crashes his car just to feel something—and it’s here the novel is at its best, ignoring the paranormal for the fascinatingly mundane.
Awful People, by Scott Mitchel May. Death of Print, February 2024. 304 pages. $20.00, paper.
Adam McPhee is a Canadian writer. Recently longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize, his short fiction has appeared in Old Moon Quarterly, Wyngraf, Ahoy Comics, and a number of other venues. He is a submissions reader for Fusion Fragment and writes Adam’s Notes, a bimonthly Substack newsletter. He lives in northern Alberta.
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Heavy Feather Review 