July 5, 2021
Kasulke’s ambitious if underwhelming debut, a fantastical workplace comedy, unfolds via Slack messages sent by employees of a New York City PR firm. Gerald works from home, trapped indefinitely “within the confines of .” Other colleagues also find opportunities to “wfh,” citing a blizzard, or kids, but one of them, Tripp, continues going into the office, where he meets Beverly, a new team member, and the two begin a secret romance. Kasulke does a good job pulling together the signifiers of office culture—the team trade pet pics and carry on inside jokes with an emoji named “dusty stick”—and they work on a campaign for a dog food company that’s in crisis mode over its product allegedly containing poison. But none of these or the other internal mini dramas—such as the incessant “howling” Lydia hears or Gerald’s unease-turned-existential crisis—are particularly engaging or inspiring, and things take a series of odd turns after the Slackbot AI takes over Gerald’s body with his mind still stuck in the digital realm. However clever the setup is, the satire lacks bite and feels not unlike listening to a friend complain about their job. For a book about Slack, it’s largely that. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary.
July 1, 2021
The petty trials and supernatural tribulations of a public relations firm are explored through its Slack conversations in this debut novel. Gerald, a mediocre employee of an unnamed PR firm, is stuck inside his company's Slack channel. He doesn't know how his consciousness became trapped inside the business communication app, and he struggles to explain to his colleagues how he's "just kinda, in here," which he describes as "pretty existentially terrifying."Gerald's co-workers barely register his predicament, however; they believe he's merely engaging in an elaborate bit to take advantage of the firm's new work-from-home policy. Meanwhile, Gerald frantically solicits help from Slackbot, the app's troubleshooting AI, who initially only responds with preprogrammed messages like, "I can help by answering simple questions about how Slack works. I'm just a bot, though!" Things get interesting when Gerald convinces his co-worker Pradeep to check on his absent body, and even more so when Slackbot discovers how to "help" Gerald. Kasulke adopts the epistolary format by restricting the action to Slack, composing his novel out of message threads titled by nickname ("#nyc-office") or the list of participants ("Nikki, Pradeep, Louis C"). Most of the conversations read incredibly quickly, even before the characters are sufficiently differentiated by typing style. Kasulke uses the line breaks and repetition of digital communication to stitch poetry out of textspeak, business lingo, adaptive chatbot phrases, and emojis--the latter represented by frustratingly clunky colon-bracketed text (": thumbsup: "). Subplots about a PR catastrophe at a dog food company, an office hookup, and an employee haunted by mysterious "howling" offer varyingly interesting sendups of business life. As Gerald dissociates further from reality in favor of endless cyberspace, he laments: "We're not made to absorb this much human information at once." A compulsively readable satire of modern corporate culture.
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Starred review from August 1, 2021
In this gloriously inventive debut, Kasulke has constructed a funny, tender, and compelling novel that consists entirely of messages on the workplace app Slack. At a New York public-relations firm, one middling employee, Gerald, has had his consciousness uploaded into Slack, and his kindly coworker Pradeep tends to Gerald's bodily needs. As Gerald's productivity improves, no one cares that he seems to be permanently working from home, and many are convinced he's committed to a long-running "bit." Indeed, strange, unexplainable, gothic events keep happening, and, as is a constant in the digital space, no one is quite sure what is real and what is not. Reminiscent of the perfectly realized drudgery of Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End (2006) and the gothic happenings of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011), this is a workplace comedy that brilliantly captures the era of remote work. Like Matthew Dicks' Twenty-one Truths about Love (2019)--which consists solely of lists--Kasulke turns what sounds like a gimmicky premise, and a limiting one at that, into a poignant depiction of the always-on nature of the contemporary workplace. Kasulke's ear for dialogue is remarkable as he truly captures the in-jokes, asides, and odd language of Slack communication. Funny, relatable, and incredibly timely, this is a hugely entertaining read.
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August 27, 2021
DEBUT Books about being Extremely Online have been carving out a slice of the literary zeitgeist in recent years; right on time to the party is Lambda Literary Fellow Kasulke's debut, told entirely through Slack conversations, emojis and all. Titled after a meme that reflects the calm before a storm--a self-explanatory metaphor in an increasingly connected and immediate world--this work concerns the Kafkaesque existential crisis of Gerald, a mid-level employee at a PR firm who suddenly finds his consciousness and corporeal form inexplicably disconnected; relegated to a virtual existence, Gerald has no idea if his body is even still alive. Light topicality follows this high-concept premise, including commentary on late capitalism's internet-aided work/life imbalance and the fiction of modern communication, but it's Kasulke's execution rather than his ideas that recommends this work. The author masters mood, inflecting his comedic core with bits of surreal horror, and demonstrates a keen ear for lingo, expressly humorous without ever forsaking authenticity. He likewise proves deft at depicting the particular rhythms of group chats, with all communication here existing within a haze of disruption. Admittedly, this comes at the expense of any real characterization, which plays third fiddle to the novel's formal playfulness and puckish conceit, but if the novel never rises above a trifle, it's at least a delicious one. VERDICT Existing in the slipstream of humanity's and technology's mutual march forward, this is a welcome if lightweight oddity that cuttingly observes the horror and humor of the modern condition.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL
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