So, a little inside baseball: This was one of the first issues of this newsletter I drafted but it kind of fizzled because I only had two examples and those were wildly disparate, tonally. And then this month I read something that elevated the whole bonkers genre of Reality TV but Going Bad so I was forced to go into my drafts boneyard and dig this up.

In Patricia Wants To Cuddle, the cast and crew of a dating show slowly realize they’ve picked the wrong isolated island location for their production. It shifts perspectives between different bachelorettes and a burnt-out producer who all have their demons. It’s a really wild ride, claustrophobic and messy and scary and queer and not like anything else I’ve read. It is also pretty brutal and graphically gory!

I’m not sure I was the ideal audience for The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey because I kept feeling like I was swimming in references I would have appreciated if I was a die-hard Real Housewives fan. That being said, I think a Wifehead, or even an Unrealhead, would love what is basically a melodrama following an ill-fated season of a Housewives-esque show that ends in multiple murders. What it lacks in violence/gore it makes up for with gasp-inducing personal revelations!

On the 10000% more unserious and cozy side is The Golden Spoon, where contestants of a baking competition run around a stately manor in upstate Vermont and nobody dies that you would particularly be bothered by. There’s secrets and subterfuge and creeping around the mansion looking for secret passageways in what I think is a fairly tonally faithful representation of If Great British Bake Off Was A Whodunnit.

How Bad Things Can Get basically holds your face in its hands when you open it and says “Listen to me. This is a book about Mr. Beast’s Squid Games. Everything in here is supposed to invoke Mr. Beast and his style of content and the potentially violent ends of commodifying human spectacle.” When I pre-ordered this book (read: fought through thousands of rivals to place a hold at the library), something about the marketing made me think it was going to be a Fyre Festival thing, but I’m not mad that it wasn’t.

Instead, it’s about a hyperpopular YouTuber with seemingly bottomless cash bringing hundreds of influencers and raffle winners to an island (I know, an island again, can you believe it?) to vie for money in increasingly perilous ways. I really like the vehicle of an off-the-rails thriller to explore stuff that’s on an author’s mind, where there’s less pressure for every pontification to be weighty or self-serious (sometimes what you need to make your point is a group of nude cannibals running through the forest with spears screaming, and I support that), and there’s a lot Coates wants to talk about here: the way contentification is eating our lives, the psychopathy of oopy spoopy true crimers (a hill I’m always willing to die on), fandom as a warped lens that perpetuates itself, and how social media flattens human lives into SEO. I don’t know if you picked up on this from my above description of nude cannibals, but there’s also a fair amount of gore in this one as well. Almost every page ups the ante in some way, ping-ponging from the protagonist’s personal struggles containing her secret identity to the alarming number of missing guests being reported to the noticeable lack of a safety officer anywhere near the stunt competitions!