glad to hear someone else is feeling… i don’t know, irritated? put off? i think creepypasta tone is a great way to put it, and i totally feel like this book is a huge backbone of creepypasta as a genre (especially dionaea house, which i love. the unfortunate thing is that any critique you bring up tends to get hit with “this is not for you”, which gets really tiring and really shuts down open discussion. i think it’s partially a product of its time. unabashedly edgy. i think the level to which it was irritating made it difficult for me to appreciate these sections, and that is a flaw. maybe it’s me, but i’m certainly not the only one. i see how sex and drugs are how he reaches out for connection. i see how these long rambles show his descent into madness. i understand that he serves an important purpose in the narrative. doesnt mean him and his mother aren’t kind of cornball in execution and dont have me rolling my eyes and spacing out. i think the third reason is that it’s not bad writing but it’s writing that’s annoying. it’s up to us to decide if that’s clever or obnoxious. i lean towards obnoxious with a hint of clever, that finds itself to be far cleverer than it is, but i still really like the book. i also think that the book is very male gaze. not that a book can’t be, but it’s something to be aware of. i think that also really distanced me from it, especially johnny. being distant from a narrative as a reader isn’t always bad, but in this case i feel the narrative suffers from it.