Extremely Online: The Internet and Connectivity in the 21st Century Novel
Though the Internet has been around since the 1980s, the “Internet novel” as a genre has only really emerged in the last decade or so. We can think of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), and Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing (2021) as notable recent examples. Each of these novels take as their topic the particular and peculiar confines of the digital world we live in. Lockwood has described this sensation as falling through a “long void that never reaches the bottom,” while Brandon Taylor claims that “the Internet Novel captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life.”