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Patrick Zaia

We are repeatedly told, by media theorists and political podcasters alike, that the alienation and fragmentation which mars contemporary society stems from the erosion of the barriers separating the digital from the physical. Manufactured virtual realities saturate our lives to such a degree that we can no longer discern simulation from reality, as engendered by the ubiquity of technology and our enforced participation in social media portals and data-mining apps. We are all nodes trapped in an ever-expanding web of technological channels, forever feeding that amorphously tentacular monster we call The Algorithm. The utopian rhetoric of connectivity and information transparency which pervaded early internet culture has been thoroughly overturned. Now, when we consider the internet and its effects on wider society, we think of conspiracy, listlessness, confusion, perversion and violence. While many are bewildered and shocked by the societal disorders produced by the virtual and the physical bleeding into one another, it has long been the subject of much horror and weird science fiction. You only need to read the fiction of J.G. Ballard, Philip K Dick, William Gibson, or William S Burroughs to realise that our current predicament has been prophesied and imaginatively rehearsed long ago.

In a manner akin to the authors aforementioned, much of today’s horror and science fiction appears intent on articulating the fears and anxieties of a society possessed by technology. The sub-genre known as Body Horror – which resides at the intersection of horror and science fiction – has proven to be particularly effective at unearthing all the dark potentialities nested within our increasingly trans-humanist culture. In this regard, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome is a foundational work of Body Horror, with its techno-surrealist visions of technologically induced hallucinations and grotesque bodily augmentations. When first released in 1983, Cronenberg’s film was viewed as a nihilistic work of fantasy, but now it is considered a prophetic and even realistic depiction of society in the 21st century. Indeed, much like the characters in Videodrome “in this new era … humans are now hackable animals,” to quote A.I. researcher Yuval Noah Harari. We Met In The Forums, the latest novel by UK based author Rob Ulitski, is a continuation of this tradition of Body Horror, as established by Cronenberg’s Videodrome, but updated and rearranged into an oddly tender examination of love and connection in the digital age.

In We Met In The Forums our central narrator is Josh, a disillusioned and apathetic young photographer living in the coastal city of Portsmouth. Bored and uninterested in his surroundings he turns to an online forum where he indulges his curiosities for all things freakish and morbid. It is here where Josh first encounters Leo, who shares his aberrant fascinations and pessimisms. The bond they form over their mutual obsessions eventually flowers into an intense friendship, which leads them to move in together and tentatively become lovers. The blossoming of Josh and Leo’s relationship, however, coincides with the sudden appearance and spread of a bizarre fungal disease which starts to infect a growing number of the Portsmouth population. When infected, throbbing pustules and leaking abscesses begin to cover the victim’s body, along with a nauseating yellow crust that initially appears to surround the eyes and face. This triggers a mass hysteria amongst the local community and unleashes a wave of conspiracy theories within certain sectors of the digital sphere. Intrigued and amused by these ghoulish events, Josh and Leo upload videos documenting the activities of the diseased to the forum. Yet, once Leo is infected and Josh begins to witness his lover’s abject transformation, the disease no longer appears to them as mere entertainment, and Josh is thrust into the dark underworlds that have formed around the mysterious contagion.

One of the strengths of Ulitski’s novel is the central narrative voice. The beginning of the book quickly establishes Josh’s boredom and dissatisfaction with the world around him. Thoroughly detached and lethargic, he describes his surroundings as grey and his conversations with former ‘real-life’ friends as beige. His dismissiveness is, at times, shocking, particularly his coldly muted reaction to his cousin’s sudden and brutal death (an early victim of the disease). The first-person perspective, coupled with the straightforward, no-frills style of prose, serves to amplify the harshness of Josh’s ennui, which is occasionally broken up by moments of humorous self-awareness. However, once his friendship with Leo is established, and Josh’s romantic feelings towards him begin to stir, his narration becomes more tempestuous. Indeed, the novel is particularly good at expressing all the petty jealousies and raging insecurities involved in burgeoning romance, which Ulitski conveys with unsparing realism. Moreover, as the novel progresses and the disease poses more of a threat to Leo’s wellbeing, Josh’s apparent coldness dissolves and his tone becomes increasingly desperate and emotional.

Peppered throughout Josh’s narration are excerpted transcripts from the online forum. At first, these excerpts serve to document Josh and Leo’s initial interactions with one another and their growing friendship. However, as the novel continues and the horror of the disease intensifies, the excerpts become centred on the online conversations surrounding the virus and its mysterious origins, which progressively turn more conspiratorial over the course of the narrative. Anonymous users call each other ‘sheeple’, urging others to wake up to occluded forces behind the disease – whether that be the deep-state, vaccine side effects or government corruption. The rhetoric employed in these sections of novel recall the battles waged during the COVID-19 pandemic over lockdowns and vaccines, reminding us how quickly these online spaces can become combative and fraught with aggressive propagandism. Indeed, by presenting these two sides of online communication within a single narrative – one being premised on connection and understanding and the other being fuelled by anger and contempt – the novel implicitly illustrates, and perhaps embodies, the schizophrenic nature of the digital realm and its divergent potentialities.

Another curious element of the narrative is how the infected react to their own contamination. When videoing the infected down by the beach, Josh and Leo note how they gleefully celebrate and revel in the degradation of their own bodies. With sickening delight, Ulitski repeatedly describes scenes where the infected roughly finger and penetrate the oozing abscesses and weeping sores that riddle their collapsing bodies. These abnormal behaviours swiftly escalate into cultish rituals that involve self-mutilation, skinning and murder. Startlingly, those infected start to believe that the contagion is a divine message issued from otherworldly entities seeking to free humanity from its corporeal chains. This ascension, however, can only be achieved through abject forms of bodily harm and sacrifice. In a Bataillean twist, the extreme and painful deformations of the body are paradoxically viewed as a means of transcending the body, which the infected inhabitants of Portsmouth, in their fevered rhapsodies, frame as a quasi-religious or mystical event. In this regard, We Met In The Forums subtly touches on the human need for collective belief and story, as well as how this need can warped and weaponised for nefarious purposes. Even in our contemporary moment, where notions of God and the supernatural have mostly been dispelled, a desire for communal ritual and narrative persists, which, if left untamed and unacknowledged, can lead to bizarre and dangerous consequences, as the emergence of online groups such as QAnon demonstrate.

Rob Ulitski’s We Met In The Forums is an enjoyable and intriguing novel, teeming with visceral horrors and sharp observations of contemporary life, but it does have some minor faults. In the concluding arc of the book, the narrative takes huge leaps to clarify the central mystery of the novel, where vital information concerning the origins of disease and the hysteria surrounding it are suddenly and conveniently revealed. Additionally, the novel’s climactic scenes of violence and bloodshed verged on the cartoonish, particularly when compared to earlier scenes which seemed more developed, in terms of the impact of the gore and potency of atmosphere.

Despite these criticisms, Ulitski’s We Met In The Forums is an interesting and absorbing read, interweaving concerns about technology, belief and connection into a work of Body Horror. On the surface, the novel contains all the usual delights we expect of the genre. Graphic scenes of bodily mutation and mutilation abound throughout the novel, which Ulitski describes with nauseating specificity and verve. Beneath all the viscera, however, resides a tender yet melancholic love story which probes the contradictions arising within our increasingly digitised world. We are told by our central narrator that a mysterious disease has gripped the city of Portsmouth, transforming the community beyond recognition. But perhaps the real disease isn’t the one that has emerged from the beaches, but rather from the computer screens which consume our daily lives, infecting the social body with an assortment of conflicting impulses and destructive delusions. In this regard, maybe what Josh and Leo are unconsciously searching for, in their attempt to forge an authentic connection with each other beyond the confines of the forum, is a cure for the contagions inflamed by the collapse of the digital into the physical.

We Met In The Forums is currently available on Godless and will be released elsewhere on the 30th of April.

Patrick Zaia is an artist, writer and musician based in Queensland, Australia. He has previously written for Horror Homeroom on Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018) and B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space.