The towering anti-masterpiece of this stage of his career is his new "thriller" The Way of the Shadow Wolves: The Deep State and the Hijacking of America. It's a gift to the camp Gods about a Mexican Cartel-Jihadist-Obama conspiracy to bring down the Great Satan with a series of devastating terrorist attacks at major monuments like the Grand Canyon (the bad guys plan to turn that thing into a giant crater!) and Camp Snoopy, and a pack of preternaturally gifted Native American "Shadow Wolves", law enforcement agents with the powers of Luke Skywalker and the political and social opinions of your racist aunt who won't stop sending you anti-Obama memes even though he's not even in office anymore. You know the one, who thinks that Dilbert is still funny but now it makes a lot of good points as well.

The Way of the Shadow Wolves seems too crazy and unhinged to exist, and yet here it is. I am going to lovingly walk you through it because there's part of me that genuinely believes that books like these are the reason I'm alive and avoiding productive labor by writing about pop culture and politics and my feelings and shit.

I was put on earth to throw myself on this and the shit I wrote about for Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club for The A.V. Club. I felt a giddy, almost manic sense of discovery reading this. It really does need to be read to be believed. I've read it, taken extensive notes and written a four thousand word essay about it, and I'm still not entirely convinced it's not all just a brilliant practical joke from Steven Seagal, the new Andy Kaufman.

One of the key rules of screenwriting, indeed in storytelling, is to use narration only when absolutely necessary. So it is surreal to see Seagal flagrantly break that role in a fucking novel! In a spectacularly clumsy opening gambit, the novel opens with our protagonist watching the end of a documentary about Native Americans with clumsily expository narration that, in angry defiance of everything we know about documentaries, and film, and reality, continues after the film ends and well into the end credits, specifically:

“Native Americans have an innate and powerful spiritual connection wit the earth and its creatures. An understanding of the ‘true nature’ of all that is on this planet and how it works in the perfect balance of cause and effect. An elite group within the Native American communities, known as Shadow Wolves, are part of this perfect balance and are the ‘best of the best’, with the ability to see what can’t be seen with the eyes. They know without having to be taught. They blend easily with the night. True right and wrong is ingrained in their souls, which makes them able to stand against evil no matter the cost. To see footprints on rock.”