Henry Reviews: "The Psychographist" by Carson Winter
Finally, a book asking whether or not capitalism is bad.
Warning: This book and review contains discussion and depictions of questionable consent, incest, cannibalism and auto-cannibalism.
In 1987, then Prime Minister of England Margaret Thatcher stated that “There is no such thing as socie-”
NO. God dammit, I’m not going to allow myself to start every anti-capitalist thing ever with a quote from Thatcher or Reagan.
The Psychographist, by Carson Winter, is a book about the way our base desires are perverted by a world that actively seeks to exploit them. It’s good, and I don’t need to poke the corpse of the Iron Lady to demonstrate it.
I think it’s indicative of the kind of books that I’m reading at the moment that the very next tome I picked up (Economic Science Fictions) had an incredible sentence discussing the “realist” vision of capitalism.
“Capitalism works with how people actually are; it does not seek to remake humanity in some (idealised) image, but encourages and releases those ‘instincts’ of competition, self-preservation and enterprise that always re-emerge no matter what attempts are made to repress or contain them.”
Then of course there’s the inimitable Ursula le Guin, who says:
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
Here we have two quotes about capitalism, one descriptive, and another hopeful.
The Psychographist, on the other hand, stares deep into the soul of capitalism and marketing, and imagines a world where these forces have complete control us.
Tell me what you want, what you really really want.
Winter takes his time setting up the circumstances of the story. The first act fleshes out the family we’ll be following, and the humdrum reality of it is what really strikes me about these people. In his previous novella, Soft Targets, the main characters were heightened and caricaturised. On the whole that book felt, to me, like reading an action comic; while elements were recognisable, the situation was fundamentally unrealistic. By taking his time at the start of The Psychographist, Winter is showing us how real these people are. Odds are, you know these people, or some simulacrum of them in real life.
The father and husband in the dead end job, gambling his meagre earnings on crypto and get rich quick schemes.
The long-suffering mother and wife, who has given up herself for the life of her kids.
The teenage girl stuck in the dead end town, dreaming of an escape to college.
The teenage boy, seemingly unable to impress girls, thinking a fancy car or bigger muscles will do it.
Each of them is an archetype of wants, a set of desires that are, as yet, outside their reach. Their unique forms of desperation is noted by a marketing man, a Psychographist new to town and conducting marketing research on a new product. And what do you know, our nuclear family has been selected.
The research? Stay in the house for a month with the new Product (it’s simply called the Product), and you’ll get enough money to solve your problems.
And this is where the story really kicks off.
Research Pipeline
Despite taking his time with the setup, Winter is able to write in such a way that you are drawn to the next page like some kind of hound. He has that type of pulpy (and I mean that as a compliment) style that is conversational, witty, and rapid, and before you know it the world around you has disappeared and you’re flipping through the book just to find out what happens next.
He’s also, it has to be said, really good at writing, clearly and matter-of-factly, some of the most horrifically messed up shit. The domesticity of the situation leans into this; to write cosmic horror is one thing, to write a common psychopath is another. What Winter does here, and so effectively, is take the common, almost mundane situation and twist it until two thirds of the way through the book you’re almost nodding along as the characters give into their base desires, driven as it were by the constant low thrum of the Product through their consciousness. Don’t get me wrong, this book isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s also a lot of fun and it’s clear that Winter cares about the themes he’s exploring.
SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH
A couple of the most openly horrific scenes in the book do need to be approached with care if you’re squeamish or have triggers (as mentioned at the top), including an incest scene described in an uncomfortable amount of detail. I had trouble reading it, as with some of the scenes which deal with implied and ambiguous sexual violence.
END SPOILERS
The extremely graphic scenes are telegraphed from quite early on, so the shock isn’t the immediate sort of twist when it happens. The realisation that it’s going to happen occurs many, many chapters before, and is so tightly woven into the overall thematic language of the book that it doesn’t feel out of place, but there is a real sense of dread and horror as what is transpiring follows you across the page. It’s over the top without being unnecessary to the story. I think the thing that I liked about the way it was depicted was the fact that while they were voyeuristic, it was directed at the reader, not at the characters. Every step of the way, I almost felt as though I was being asked “and what do you think of this?”
Collapse
Carson Winter has a deft hand for showing these kinds of taboo and frightening things in his stories while still making it clear that he doesn’t advocate for the acts themselves. It’s extremely clear to me that everything he’s doing is as a criticism of the larger, systemic ill.
Everyone has a price. It’s one of those truisms that gets bandied about, usually by the exact sort of smug asshole who talks about how expensive his watch is when you ask him for the time. What the Psychographist shows us is that there are two prices: the price to get in, and the price to get out.
The fact that to some extent, these desires are what marketing feeds on, how the machine grows, and the fact that it is constantly and always trying to sneak more access to the monster that is the human condition, is something that is going to gnaw at me from within myself for quite some time.
The Psychographist is out now through Apocalypse Party Press.
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Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next time.