Indie Sleaze Philip K. Dick: my Samuel Richardson Prize choice

The Wayback Machine (2025) by Daniel Falatko

Regular readers of this newsletter will be unsurprised to learn that my favorite of the Samuel Richardson Self-Published Novel Prize finalists owes its paranoiac soul to Philip K. Dick. PKD is a writer’s writer, but few of his acolytes ever manage to pull off a worthy homage to the man. I should know; I’ve tried. What is the essence of a PKD novel? Menacing darkness, deadpan humor, epistemological uncertainty, a malevolent and/or indifferent woman—the levels on the mixing board are set just so, and most attempts to replicate or remix the masters fail. My choice to win the contest has engineered a solution.

And it’s not even science fiction.

The Wayback Machine by Daniel Falatko

Nathan is a Gen X-Millennial cusper, an OG hipster of the type that flocked to neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Wicker Park in the late 90s. It was, in Nathan’s mythologizing, the last spontaneous flowering of true grass-roots cultural production before art and music and coolness were acquired and corporatized by soulness multinationals. Nathan is a dirtbag everyman, a PR hatchet man-cum-drug-runner who served, according to him, as the scapegoat for a dirty industry seeking to rewrite its own history. In the process, Nathan was written out. Newly out of prison, all he cares about is writing himself back in, and he doesn’t care who he pisses off with his inconvenient truth-telling.

At least, he doesn’t care until figures from his past start to threaten him. Is he paranoid, or are they really out to get him? What does it mean if you can’t corroborate your own ‘reality’ with the internet? What does ‘truth’ even mean when your enemies control the narrative?

Early on, Nathan occupies the apartment of his old friend who recently died from an overdose on fentanyl-laced coke. The only book his friend had was a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories.¹ It’s not a short story that The Wayback Machine brings to mind, but a novel. As I read, I couldn’t stop thinking about Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974). In it, a world-famous late-night television host wakes up to discover that he has been erased from the world. Where once he had legions of adoring fans and Hollywood superstar lovers, he is suddenly and completely forgotten. He never existed in the first place. There is no record of his birth, no government documents, nothing that would allow him to move freely through the repressive surveillance state.

The mechanism for this erasure is never revealed. Everyone he encounters thinks he’s crazy. How could you be sure that they weren’t right, that your old life wasn’t some elaborate delusion? How would you survive in a world that had erased every trace of you? Where would you go? Who could you trust?

The Wayback Machine removes the unexplained supernatural element but retains the metaphysical uncertainty. Turns out, just because Nathan knows why and how he’s been scrubbed doesn’t make the experience any less disorienting and violent than what PKD’s hero suffers. As the goons from his past close in, Nathan clings to his story, insisting on his version of events as though it’s the only thing that matters. The only thing between existence and oblivion.

Falatko balances a present-action paranoid pursuit plot with juicy revelations from Nathan’s long-gone scuzzy music-industry heyday in alternating chapters of straight prose and podcast transcripts. I found the transcript to be an effective device and not overly gimmicky. I’m not a Zoomer, but I do sometimes co-host a podcast with one and I found the diction of the young podcast hosts to be convincing and entertaining. The prose is well-written and controlled, mostly straightforward but edging into grim lyricism when the narrative demands it to communicate the depth of Nathan’s alienation or the desolation of the city’s gentrified soullessness.

The only weak points are the very beginning and the very end. I was initially put off by the opening description of Nathan’s teeth in chapter one. It felt like an unnecessary flourish, trying a little too hard to set the tone from the jump.

What does it take for a bottom row of teeth to achieve such grey-yellow majesty? Misshapen and yawning and raw, lined up with no sense of alertness or purpose. Any of them could defect at any moment if they only had the energy. They leaned on one another for support, careless and slumped like fentanyl addicts in a trap house (3).

The simile felt like the author saying “hey! Look! This is not like other books! Pay attention!” But it worked. I paid attention. Revisiting the passage now, I’m not sure what exactly I was responding negatively to. Maybe I was being overly critical going into it. After all, I didn’t want a New York Book to be the best one. Something about New York Books feels antithetical to the spirit of the contest. Luckily, in addition to its other merits, about a third of the book actually takes place in Los Angeles, which I do fuck with and consider a sort of ancestral home, so at worst I am guilty of celebrating a bicoastal book.

I feel more confident in my criticism of the ending. It’s rushed. The pace is brisk throughout, but it accelerates past the point of viability in the final pages. Without any spoilers, there is a moment at the end that badly deserved to be lingered upon. [To the tune of Suburban Home by Descendants:] I want to be manipulated, I want to be toyed with. Falatko passes over it in the space of a single paragraph to race to the end and sacrifices some emotional power in the process.

My Hipster Bona Fides

I was born at the other edge of the Millennial generation. By high school, ‘hipster’ was already a slur; an American Apparel opened up next to an Urban Outfitters in my Chicago suburb and my friends and I shoplifted from both stores regularly as teens. The scene was already a parody of itself by the time I blossomed into a college radio hipster in the early 2010s. I didn’t listen to much of the indie/alt music that’s namechecked in the book—my beat was mostly old-timey folk plus some punk—but exposure to some of it was unavoidable at the radio station (shout out to 88.5fm WHPK, the Pride of the Southside!). I interned at Carrot Top Records² and Drag City³. I rolled Drum tobacco and wore thrifted ironic sweaters and baggy men’s flannels. In 2014 I worked the merch tent at the Pitchfork music festival.

This is all to say that the early-aughts Brooklyn scene with which the book is concerned is legible to me, although I was never a part of it. I watched it eat itself alive from Chicago. This accounts for my fondness of the story, although I also find it to be a well-crafted book that I think can be enjoyed even if you don’t immediately identify all the in-jokes and cultural references. Many of the bands and people referenced are real (I had to Google some of them to check). Others are thinly veiled stand-ins. An edgy magazine called “Bad Habits” (=Vice) features prominently, as does the music blog “Dagger” (=Pitchfork). My favorite Easter egg is a reference to the famous 0.0 Pitchfork rating of a Jet album, which was just a monkey pissing in its own mouth.

While Nathan and the Gen Z nostalgia podcasters are hung up on the indie sleaze⁴ era, the book itself feels highly contemporary and functions as a commentary on the current world of 30% ‘suggested’ coffee shop tips, ubiquitous weed and vape shops, the Epstein files, and the yawning abyss of urban income inequality. Falatko is a keen observer of our boring dystopia and has succeeded in capturing the terrible vibes.

I want to note that Daniel Falatko is a staple of the LitStack shitposting culture in which I feel alarmingly at home, we were both published in the inaugural issue of Magazine Non Grata, and I have recently had some friendly interactions with him online. But before I read his book, my only direct interactions with him consisted of him mocking me for being a whiny suburbanite in the comments of my New York scene report. I was not predisposed to like his book, but it won me over.

NB:

This is only my choice for the best of the finalists. Other judges are still deliberating and the final winner will be determined sometime next month.

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Honorable Mention

The Wayback Machine was the clear winner to me, but I did want to highlight another notable finalist. Wide Walt and the Rock Creek Gang is a strange little fantasy about Walt Whitman and a group of modern hobos who take poetry very seriously. The narrative flips between Walt Whitman encountering an escaped slave and his white lover during the Civil War and a modern-day laid-off community college English instructor who stumbles upon a colony of homeless poetry lovers. They argue earnestly over whether Keats or Whitman is the greatest poet of all time. It reads like a fairytale and it’s set in Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. I loved the sense of place (more DC books, please!) and it certainly gets points for originality, but all the verse eventually started to feel gimmicky to me. Devoted Keats and Whitman lovers may enjoy it more.

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A Post-Nuclear Novella

In the spirit of the Samuel Richardson Self-Published Novel Prize, I also wanted to recommend a recently self-published novella that was not part of the contest. I posted about it on Substack Notes, the Twitter-ish side of the website, but since most of my readers are not there I wanted to share my brief review here as well.

I took Burn Zone by Cairo Smith along with me to an appointment in DC last week mostly because it is very thin and easy to slip into my purse. I found it utterly absorbing. Read it en route, in the waiting room, at lunch, and finished on the commute home. It’s about a post-war military tribunal in an occupied, irradiated future Boston, where a small band of wartime conspirators are being held to account for the choices they made to preserve a world that no longer exists.

Exceptional writing: the sparse modernist style doesn’t overstay its welcome and somehow leaves room for genuinely tender moments of reflection; the worldbuilding is deft and light; the characters are psychologically compelling and mostly well-developed in spite of the brevity of each of their appearances. Through flashbacks to a critical meeting, we get to see how each character views themselves and every other member of the group. This floating narration reminded me somewhat of the famous banquet scene in Dune (iykyk), although with a lot more interiority.

Of the three books I’ve read by Cairo, this is my favorite. They’re all very different in style and subject and well-executed in their own ways, but Burn Zone is really tightly plotted and styled and hits on some of my pet interests (like nuclear war, occupation, resistance, societal collapse). It’s also the shortest, at 117 pages. If you were scared away by the Zoomer brainrot voice of Scenebux, which I reviewed last year, you won’t find any of that here. I strongly recommend Burn Zone.⁵

Hope you’re having a nice start to spring. The cherry blossoms are in peak bloom here in DC. Here’s a song that I learned about from The Wayback Machine. It’s a bop!

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1. The title is given on page 37 as When Trees Become Robots (Or Do They?) which is, to my knowledge, fake and a joke, a play on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I’ve read a lot of PKD stories and cannot recall any in which trees may or may not become robots. I may be going out on a (robot tree) limb here, but I think the glibness of this reference is misdirection. I think the presence of this PKD collection is the secret key to the whole book.

2. Most famous for The Handsome Family, whose song Far From Any Road was used as the theme song for True Detective season 1

3. Famous for Silver Jews, Pavement, Joanna Newsom, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Ty Segall etc

4. I wasn’t aware of the term ‘indie sleaze’ until a few years ago. I think it’s a post-hoc designation, but I actually quite like it and think it’s apt for a subculture that came to be delineated by exploitative Dov Charney ad campaigns and edgy blog posts that seem simultaneously shocking and quaint in retrospect—like a rabbit-duck illusion.

5. My husband thinks I should add the disclaimer that Cairo has published some of my stories in his literary magazine, I sometimes appear on his podcast, and I consider him a Substack homie, so although the above is my honest assessment, I could be biased through my association with him. If he wants to send me a commission for any sales that this review generates for him, he has my PayPal.