Read This: Drill
Drill, Scott R. Jones’s fantastic new novel from Word Horde, is a rumination on belief, betrayal, and cosmic horrors as told by a deeply wounded soul. Jones’s narrator is a strange version of himself–a self-made sorcerer struggling with the pain and consequences of his damaged family. He speaks directly to his readers, explaining, persuading, luring us into his grand scheme to right a private wrong on a universal scale. It is impossible not to be swept up in his attempts to exact vengeance on god and man alike.
As Jones succinctly puts it, “I tell the truth but I tell it slant”.
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Jones is a master of creating fully-realized characters who must navigate worlds where the unimaginably weird has become disturbingly normal. In Drill, Jones immerses us in such a world. His autofictional narrator’s conversational, sometimes confessional stream of consciousness gels into a dark and strange personal history tainted by horrors both otherworldly and all too familiar. Lovecraftian chaos is always just outside the frame of the story.
Until it breaks through.
“Everybody hungry” is a driving theme, and that hunger takes many forms. Cult members crave safety and salvation no matter the cost, a god exists as a parasitic infection to devour the humans it inhabits, the narrator himself is consumed by loss and thirsting for a revenge that may not satisfy.
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In the end, Drill is a looping, unreliable narrative full of hurt and regret and doubt, circling back again and again to the destructiveness of blind faith and true believers. Underneath the chaos and ritual there is an ineffable sadness. At its bleak heart, this is a family tragedy. And what is actual autobiography and what is only fiction is harder to parse than you would think.
Jones has created a mesmerizing novel of loss and vengeance. Its intimate familial conflict, religious fervor, and ravening supernatural forces are richly-detailed, resonant and deeply felt. Drill’s resolution only underscores the vast meaninglessness of our lives that underlies so much cosmic horror.
I highly recommend it.