First published 2021
A woman finds herself famous for her online posts and embarks on a global tour to meet her followers. She calls the internet "the portal" and feels trapped by its endless demands and strange new rules. The portal fills her head with countless voices that seem to control her thinking. She watches climate disasters unfold, economic systems crumble, and a dictator rise to power, all while posting deeper into the digital void. Images and references pile up until nothing makes sense anymore. Users ask themselves if they're living in hell, if they'll keep scrolling until they die. Then her mother sends two urgent messages that shatter everything. Real life crashes into the portal's absurd theater. The woman must face a world that shows her both overwhelming evidence of human goodness and crushing proof of cruelty. She confronts what it means to love and connect when language itself has been broken by the endless scroll.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, social-media
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: social-commentary, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Global
Period: Contemporary
210 pages · Hardcover · Bloomsbury Circus
Content warnings: mental-illness