© 2013 James LaFond

2011, Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd., San Francisco, CA, 103 pages

This is one of those rare books I cannot place a value on, as that would be a very subjective, and different, value, for each reader. For many readers Under the Nihil could be the masterpiece they hate.

Aside from the last few pages it is not in the least entertaining.

If you are a conservative man, even reading the first 12 pages would be like medieval dentistry, or more like having some punk spit in your face while you tried to brush your teeth.

If you are a woman, reading Under the Nihil would amount to reading the journal of the creep who fantasizes about raping and murdering you.

If you are a liberal person, reading this book would very likely leave you with the sensation that someone defecated in your brain, with the tragedy compounded by the fact that they did so with your consent.

Now, if you are an embittered American male, who has permitted our feminized society to emasculate you, and you now find yourself little more than a testosterone-leakage cipher in a cultureless society, than Under the Nihil was written for and about you.

Under the Nihil is a fictional e-journal, addressed from an anonymous participant in a psychological conditioning study, to the anonymous man that recruited him. Andy Nowicki can write! The science-fiction premise is that the journalist is a test subject in a program to develop suicidal war-fighters who will blow themselves up like jihadists without any religious motivation. The focus of this project seems to be the search to weaponize American nihilism.

This novella starts out more negatively than anything I have read. Andy Nowicki paints a masterpiece of a person who is a combination of the worst type of selfish hate-filled American teenager, and the perennial figure of the embittered, unfulfilled middle-aged American woman playing the woe-is me societal blame-game. When one combines these two irritating and unsympathetic creatures, you get the modern American sub-man, who either descends into nihilism or joins the ‘new right’ in some fashion as a means to discover the masculinity that society denied him, and the ‘birthright’ unaccomplished males in all materialistic societies seem to fantasize is their due.

Mister Nowicki’s journalist is the single most unsympathetic character I have encountered in fiction—by a long shot. I would rather have lunch with Sauron or play chess with Doctor No, than to share a park bench with this 25-year-old twit for ten minutes. And somehow, having created this American male mirror of a whining effete proto-monster, seemingly birthed somewhere between a catholic seminary, a porn site, and a video game, the author gets the reader to turn every page.

I recalled, as a boy, watching every one of Mohamed Ali’s fights in the hopes that he would lose, as he was such a reprehensible person to be worshipped so by the celeb-nation that I first came to doubt based on his deification. And so I turned every page of this just-south-of-30,000-word-novella, in hopes that the journalist would meet some horrible end of his own devise…

Under the Nihil is a desperate snapshot of one emasculated misogynistic nerd’s view of America. If that is not bad enough, when you get to the bitter juvenile protagonist’s conclusion of his place in life, and in what manner of place he holds this dubious position, you may find, as I did, that the unredeemable twerp agrees with you, as to what America has become. I found that agreement in my mind generated a chill that traveled down my spine.

Andy Nowicki crafted a powerful narrative that begins by asking the question, ‘how could America match Islamic Jihadist fervor through medication’ and ends up answering an entirely different question, which I will leave for Mister Nowicki’s strange novella to illuminate for the reader.

Under the Nihil