Man, but Sam Kriss really has a thing going on.

You think the United States started on the East Coast and gradually spread westward? Not true. Totally fake. It began, if it began, right in the centre, the Mississippi valley, the heart of the continent; it’s a riverine civilisation, like Egypt or China. Over its long long history it expands and contracts, diastolic and systolic, like a heart; when it reaches outwards it brushes against the oceans and sometimes it can even cross to the opposite shores; when it draws in again, the fringes of the empire revert to barbarism. It’s been doing that for thousands of years. Maybe more. America is two hundred and fifty thousand years old. Two and a half million years old, maybe. It’s always existed. It lives outside time.

And what that thing is, I’ve decided, is a very timely combination of 1) a sort of Borgesian fabulation, heavily reliant on the dead-pan interpolation and interpretation of other texts, some real and some completely made up, and 2) a Hunter Thompson-esque eye for the grotesque, which is at the same time an eye for the fracture-lines of the political landscape—the points where a well-aimed prod will reliably elicit a flinch, regardless of which side of the line the reader thinks themselves to be standing.

Add in a very contemporary sense for the weird, in the emergent counter-cultural sense that the term is currently used—which is partly about a revival or re-engagement with occult and esoteric systems of thought, if only at the level of flirting for many, but which is more often, I think, a descriptor for the aesthetic of an encounter with history for a generation that has been raised to assume that everything prior to the advent of digital cameras is probably just backstory, dreamt up in a fevered afternoon by the drug-addled writer’s room that scripts the reality show they live in—and you’ve got this thing that Kriss does, a genre with (so far as I can tell) one adherent.

And long may it continue. That said, I wonder when we’ll start to see the imitators?