Brian Blankenship

If you’re the breed of nerd old enough to remember a time when playing DND, reading comics, and obsessing over pop culture meant you weren’t cool or branded you a social outcast then you’ll love this book. It’s a poorly written, brazenly self-unaware string of references to old video games and pop culture with a skeletal story that serves more to show how much useless information Ernest Cline has than an actual story that’s interesting or needs to be told. It’s only aging worse with every successive year because it’s narrative voice sounds more and more like that of the basement dwelling trolls who view themselves as the defenders of a subculture that’s being co-opted by a left leaning mainstream culture and tampering with their obsessions. As a reminder, Cline also wrote the script to “Fanboys”, a straight to video ode to man-children who slobber over boobies and fart on each other all in a quest to prove how into Star Wars they are. Cline is a one note hack and a dinosaur in an era where pop culture is much more than horny man-boy fantasy realization.