“I didn’t think it could get worse after the 2016 release, but it got worse—much, much worse.”
“Horrible character development. It’s nearly impossible to believe these people are real.”
“I stayed up all night to find out what would happen. I still don’t know, and I might never sleep again.”
“The addition of a second antagonist came as something of a surprise, since he wasn’t mentioned in promotional materials.”
“A cross between Mein Kampf and the Bible.”
“Finally, something for fans of both Nietzsche and Nabokov.”
“An excellent example of chaos theory.”
“It will be cited for centuries for its lack of structure.”
“Breaks all the rules… and not in a good way.”
“Like Dostoevsky, but with less humor.”
“Aimed toward 1 percent of readers.”
“Requires an unusual suspension of belief.”
“Things start out disastrous and only get worse in this postapocalyptic epic disguised as current events.”
“Is it science fiction? How-to? History? Hard to say where to shelve this shitshow of a title.”
“A roller coaster ride into hell with a convicted felon and a billionaire as your guides!”
“Feels both jarringly new and eerily familiar—like WWII.”
“You will require therapy after this.”
“Slightly confusing if you haven’t read Machiavelli and Silence of the Lambs.”
“As with all sequels, it is definitively worse than the original.”
“Not intended for children.”
“Reads like a Russian novel with an exhaustive list of untrustworthy characters who go by various aliases, each with sordid backstories. It’s hard to keep up with the plot (if there is one), which feels intentional on the part of the author.”
“Corruption, espionage, violence, lack of respect for any work that has come before. A new genre emerges: naval-gazing horror.”
“You won’t know who to trust.”
“Not since Lord of the Flies has adolescent, masculine cruelty been so accurately displayed.”
“Does not conform in any way to form or structure, with a blatant disregard for all rules, with shoddy, often incoherent sentence fragments passing as coherent thought, and long, meandering, repetitive riffs on seemingly random, unrelated topics. Not unlike trying to interact with a toddler mid-tantrum.”
“Who is the target audience for this? Really, who?”
“As if a bigoted ostrich experimented with ChatGPT.”
“It’s like if the monkeys were typing Shakespeare, but then they replaced monkeys with fascists and the typewriters with AK-47s.”
“True crime at its finest.”
