Stalkers, Chat Bots and Trolls: Stories From Our Lives Online

YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
Stories
By Mary South

A virus snaking across the globe, headlines and viral tweets spreading conspiracy theories and panic, warnings not to touch one another or gather in person: Mary South couldn’t have predicted our current moment, but her stories could not feel timelier. Anxieties about a seemingly unstoppable pandemic would fit right into her debut collection, “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” which examines the myriad ways technology deteriorates our mental and physical well-being.

Each of South’s self-contained, bleak and tightly wrought chapters centers on themes of isolation, loneliness and how screens aren’t just a constant presence in our daily interactions, they’re directing them. Virtual interactions, she suggests, are wrecking our sense of community, our relationships and even our bodies. The universes she conjures skate between science fiction-like dystopia and an all-too-familiar present reality saturated by bad news, selfish people and endless memes. Jobs are meaningless, interactions hollow; a mordant humor underscores each character’s essential bitterness.

South is fixated in particular on women and the challenges they face in this always-online era — how they and their bodies can be manipulated, distorted, abused. Her depictions of pregnancy and childbirth bring to mind a Margaret Atwood-esque darkness. As does her treatment of assault: In the title story, a woman stalks her rapist, first online and then in person. He’s a successful venture capitalist; she does content moderation at a search engine, weeding out hate speech, pornography and terrorist executions from the public domain. Her obsession with him is so bleakly relatable it’s almost comical: She doesn’t follow him on social media, so “when the woman accidentally liked a post, she reached a new personal best in self-hatred, just as the rapist was reaching a new personal best in his triathlon.”

Image

Other stories zero in on characters’ sad, and always failed, attempts to connect. One is set at a nursing home where caregivers eavesdrop on their elderly patients having phone sex. Another takes place at a camp where teenagers go to be weaned from their addictions to internet trolling. There’s an architect whose daughter’s birth defect is creative fodder for her “ravaging style,” and a mother who believes she’s birthed the same child again, a decade later.

Computers, on the other hand, provide opportunities for successful bonds. In “Age of Love,” researchers “hypothesized that people in that late stage of life found it safer to reveal their deepest selves to an object, as it would never abandon them, never judge. Perhaps, they reasoned, the elderly would feel safer being attended by machines.”

South shows a comedic slickness with language, as when she parodies chat forums for TV fans: “Laptops toasty on top of our tummies, we comment. We throw down. We emoji. It’s difficult to surmise our actual number — we may be thousands strong, or we may be one insomniac hacker.” In “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy,” she skewers the hollowness of cancer culture: “What occurs next is this: fatigue, mood swings, muscle weakness, confusion as to the purpose of a toaster. Family and friends drop by to tell you that you’re an ‘inspiration’ or to utter phrases about ‘the indomitable human spirit.’ … Positive social media updates about your progress or how the tumor ‘may have killed a couple of brain cells but can’t kill your sense of humor’ will proliferate.”

South has said that she’s interested in how a story emerges from our digital behaviors, our mindless scrolling for comfort or company. But “the technology is never the point of the stories,” she explained to The New Yorker. “The point is the profound loneliness these characters feel, and what the technology reveals about their mental states.”

That profound loneliness, though, becomes tiresome after so many chapters, and South’s fetishization of illness can be off-putting. The reader keeps hoping for something or someone to redeem the collection from despair, but that seems to be a little too much to ask for. If you’re looking for an escape from everything that is awful right now, it’s not this.