Over the course of October 2025 through April 2026, I gradually made my way through Mark Z. Danielweski’s newest novel Tom’s Crossing. The prolonged period of reading was partly because the book itself is a beast, clocking in at 1228 pages. But it was also because the story itself demanded time. Its prose is dense and meandering, told the way one might share a tale in front of a campfire, where it is assumed the listeners already know the basics and how it ends and so the enjoyment comes from the flourishes and the way its told. A story that has been passed down numerous times with everyone having a slightly different version that needs to be accounted for. Indeed, at numerous points the book stops to inform you of the particular way others have interrupted the events of the story through various mediums. Tom’s Crossing demands you take your time with it, and I found it a richer experience for that.

There is a friction to Tom’s Crossing, as there is with all of Danielewski’s work. The effort it took to put all this down and form it into a novel was certainly tremendous, and while I don’t want to sound too MFA pretentious, reading it is no small task either. Not because it is difficult to follow plot wise; one could compress the action into an easily digestible story without much difficulty. But Danielewski knows that simplicity invites meaning, and the story is in many ways about everything else that occurs when actions are carried out. How those actions can ripple out within a community and within people’s lives, and attempts to track and process them all create labyrinths of meaning. But by making it through the labyrinth, by dealing with the friction, the experience stays with you.

The lack of required effort, lack of friction, is what people intuitively clock when they talk about “slop.” Whether its images or writing generated by LLMs or the way MCU movies have been sanded down to be produced like an assembly line, any attempt to streamline the creative process tends to be noticeable. Terms like “generic” or “cookie cutter” or “formulaic” all get at the same core criticism; that the path of least resistance is being utilized. No challenge is being undertaken by the creators nor asked of the audience. Risk and the potential to do something new or unique is avoided in service of something safe and easy.

I want to walk a possibly fine line here. I do not believe that all entertainment must be “challenging.” Not every movie or book or game need ask its audience to ponder deep, probing questions or hours of playtime to progress. I am not arguing for pretension. People seek entertainment for all sorts of reasons, often within the same day. But even within lighter entertainment, we still look for something of substance. Things like The Muppets or MST3K are not deep or cerebral shows. But they do showcase artists overcoming limitations, and in doing so they create an infectious charm that invites investment. The DIY ascetic of MST3K gels perfectly with the B-moives they so clearly love, and it is because of that love that the riffing is so effective. The performers of the Muppets are working with simple felt and fabrics, but by talent and the sheer force of their creativity they bring to life full-on characters who consistently have human actors treating them as if they are real. There is a charm and sense of purpose to the work they are doing that is sharpened by the roadblocks they need to overcome. Having to deal with that friction is what allows a distinct voice to shine through and makes engaging with it fun.

But projects like these are risky, because they require that work and effort and time. They are, in a word, inefficient. This is a nightmare for corporate execs who live their lives according to Line Go Up. In their world you want to remove as much friction as possible, because that typically means lowering the cost or speeding up production. Making things efficient makes everything easier. This is the allure LLMs hold to the unimaginative, the promise that friction can be removed and you can prompt the generation of an image or a novel with minimal fuss. And, in the most literal sense, it is that easy. All the friction that comes with trying and failing over and over again until you succeed is jettisoned. Thing is, the friction is what matters. The rubbing up and scraping against it is what causes you leave a bit of yourself behind. Those residual pieces left clinging are often what makes a given work special, the reasons why it stays with an audience. Those are pieces of you, after all, and could only come from you.

There is a point in the latter half of Tom’s Crossing where the story jumps ahead many years from the main narrative to follow the owner of an art gallery. Up to this point the narrator has continually mentioned a variety of people who have their own theories of what happened, and describes the pieces of art many of them have created to bring their interpretations of the events we have been following to life. Those all come together in this section, where a number of these works and people end up collected in the same space, with the owner increasingly intrigued by the events no one is directly talking about despite clearly being the reason everyone is there. It’s an intriguing section of the book, as the reader is treated both to depictions of events they have already seen and ominous hints at what is still in store. It also makes plain the value and need of artistic expression. The owner and his employees are quick to mention how many of the pieces that have been brought in are amateurish, even poorly done. But that ceases to matter as the night goes on. They find themselves drawn to the pieces and the story they represent. The technique and quality take a backseat because the sense of need on the part of the artists to make these thoughts tangible is impossible to overlook. All the various people, most of whom never made another piece of art before or after, were so affected by these events that they went out of their way to create something, despite having no formal training or prior skill, in order to memorialize it. And it is that need, that intent, that force of will, that ends up giving these works their power.

This is why attempts to bypass the actual process are doomed to at best ridicule. Even those who profess the wonders of using AI to write, and even teach classes on using it, will keep it at a distance and may not even use their professional name in association¹. It is apparent, even by those who champion it, that there is something lost in reducing the act of creation to an optimization of output.

Friction benefits the audience too. Doing the work of engaging with one piece allows you a greater pathway to understanding another. In his book Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne Nathan Weinstein discusses the function of doors in games. Most of the time doors act as an obstacle, but in From games like Bloodborne they are often eventual short cuts, only opening once you have gone the long way around and gotten to the other side. These doors “serve not to move you forward to new areas but rather to get you back more efficiently to where you have already been.”² Your first time through an area may be difficult, but once you have succeeded there are now new pathways to make the journey easier next time.

I think this idea can be applied to stories and art. The more you engage with with various pieces, the more pathways you form, the easier it becomes to connect them to one another. All those previous experiences continually inform how you view and interpret the next one, providing “shortcuts” to a richer understanding of what is being expressed. Saros, for example, is not particularly subtle about its themes of greed and desire. You can pick up on them easily with even a cursory playthrough. But if you happen to know a lot about The King in Yellow, which Saros takes a lot of loose inspiration from, those themes become richer.³ Subtext gets added that provide an enhanced understanding of the story the game is telling. The knowledge of that additional material provides a short cut of a different kind, allowing you to add depth and insight based on what you have already experienced before. It is not strictly necessary to enjoy the game, but it does make it more rewarding and engaging. The story leaves room for that additional meaning to be brought in, and allows for it to stay with you longer than it otherwise might. The additional “work” of engaging with those separate, earlier pieces of art makes it easier to appreciate this present piece to a larger degree. Is it “optimal” or “efficient?” No. The “efficient” story is one that is fully self-contained, which can be engaged with on its own terms and only on its own terms, and does not require you bring anything else in. Frictionless. But those are not the ones we remember.

To bring it back again to Tom’s Crossing, the various people the narrator mentions who provide their own thoughts and interpretations on the story’s events frequently make comparisons to The Iliad and The Odyssey. This is their shortcut, their doorway to engaging more deeply with the (for them) real world events. Having experienced and engaged with and thought about those works they have a larger toolbox to interpret the actions of Kalin and Old Porch and even Nature itself. They can approach the actions and consequences of the various characters with a unique understanding forged by their interpretations of the art they previously engaged with. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and because of that more is gained from continuously challenging yourself with a spectrum of experiences. Like these individuals we as an audience can act as a conduit for all sorts of work to be in conversation with each other, even beyond what may have been intended by the authors.

It has become a common tactic among AI boosters to equate this type of organic iteration with LLMs limitations, that LLMs are only able to copy and replicate what came before. This conflation also powers the need for studio executives to have everything pitched in an “its X meets Y” format. It mistakes audiences ability to create connections between works as the goal unto itself, and incentivizes all manner of shortcuts to artificially force those connections and highlight them repeatedly to make sure it does not go unnoticed. To remove the friction of audiences gaining that understanding for themselves. We are about to see this play out in real time, as the success of Backrooms has led studios on a hunt for the next big Reddit creepypasta to adapt, reminiscent of when the box office success of The Ring led to studios green lighting all manner of J-Horror adaptations. “The Ring but with Y.” Waiting for another filmmaker (or even audience member) to be organically influenced by the film and use that engagement as a source of inspiration that draws from Backrooms is not efficient. Better to take something else and force that connection.

But we all know that approach has diminishing returns. The J-Horror trend fizzled out in no small part because audiences got wise to how blatant the attempts to do another The Ring were. Even those based on great source material suffered because the point was to pump them out quickly and efficiently and make them fit the same mold as The Ring. The same has happened to the MCU over the past decade. Neither of these were due to horror or superhero fatigue; it was fatigue over the streamlined paint-by-numbers approach being taken that left no friction on either side of the equation.

And that friction is what people want. We recently saw The Mandalorian and Grogu, a supposedly anticipated big budget film that felt focus tested from its very first announcement, get trounced at the box office by Backrooms and Obsession, two weird horror movies with a fraction of the budget and supposed marketability. The Mandalorian and Grogu felt designed by committee. Backrooms and Obsession were works by filmmakers who had something they wanted to say and risks they were willing to take. Optimized does not equate to interesting, because art is not efficient. And that is a very good thing.