Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon (Citadel) [Paperback]

Zack Parsons, longtime writer for humor website Something Awful and the author of My Tank is Fight, casts his second book, Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon, as a travelogue/novel mash-up - or, perhaps more accurately, a self-insertion travelogue fanfic - that explores some of the most popular subcultures developing on the Internet. Rather than study the subcultures in their online iterations, Mr. Parsons (or, that is, the character based on the author) travels through several states to interview the strange characters hiding behind their furry avatars.

Mr. Parsons's Something Awful articles range from the utterly bizarre to the understated and wry. Perhaps his funniest work lands somewhere in the middle; for example, his caricature of Levi Johnston, the father of former Gov. Sarah Palin's grandchild, constructs the teenage father's online persona as a hilariously half-informed, yet sympathetic, rambunctious redneck. Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon tends toward the subdued, which, despite its odd episodes, allows the narrative a sense of truth. A grotesque prologue depicts a distracted Zack sustaining an intense injury to his hand while discussing the genesis of his book with his publisher; this injury, and his medical treatment, straddles the line between the improbable and the normal. Mr. Parsons maintains this level of uncertainty over the veracity of the narrative throughout much of the book, which highlights the discussion of bizarre Internet subcultures at the expense of really hilarious commentary. That said, this fictionalized, undocumented, and entertaining book offers some worthwhile insight into the nature of Internet subcultures, including furries, voraphiliacs, otherkin, fanfiction writers, Ron Paulites, self-diagnosed Aspberger's sufferers, and a cult compound.

Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon expounds on one major, overarching theme considered by Plato in his "Allegory of the Cave," in the poetry of the Romantics, and in the postmodernists' texts: that reality, that a person's conception of the world and how it functions, is constructed by an individual based on the stimuli available. Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon offers one postmodern caveat to this theme, which seems to refer directly to the motto of Something Awful: the Internet really does make you stupid. The prisoners shackled in Plato's cave and the Romantic poets wandering about the woods and enjoying nature could not comprehend the Internet's hypertextual sensory overload. This concept is best represented in the first chapter's discussion of an "Internet scholar's" experiment, in which Zack's senses are bombarded with images until they eventually influence his mental reactions to stimuli. Each of the acquaintances Mr. Parsons discusses throughout the book suffers from a similarly distorted sense of reality, as well as a healthy dose of arrested development and a nearly unshakable sense of righteousness. For example, when Zack confronts the incongruity between Janus's religion and the grotesque sexual stories she posts online, Janus responds with the incredulous rage of someone who recognizes that his or her worldview is threatened.

Rather than churn out a stream of continuous jokes, Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon employs a generally subdued tone in order to highlight the interesting discussion of Internet subcultures. However, several very funny moments interrupt the book's faux-journalistic mood. Most notably, the chapter on sexual fanfiction stories, which describes budding Internet authors who crudely recast their favorite fictional characters in XXX-rated situations, elicits tear-inducing laughter; reading Janus's samples aloud without cracking up is a near-impossible feat. The vague references to and recitations from the Super Bible are also excellent; these jokes, apparently throw-aways, are actually integrated nicely into the narrative.

But the tone begins to shift during the chapter on Lindsey Dawn Riley, a grotesque and frightening character featured in several of Mr. Parson's Something Awful articles, and this section (despite having nothing to do with Internet subcultures) makes up the most engaging and consistently funny portion of the book. This chapter moves seamlessly into an interaction with the evil leader of the white power website Stormfront (whose image reminds me of Dick Cheney leaving the White House in his wheelchair on the day of President Obama's inauguration). And, in the exciting final chapter, an outraged Zack antagonizes of the leaders of a cult known for recruiting its lonely members from the Internet. Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon, then, offers intriguing insights and sporadic moments of laughter when it sticks to its supposed premise, but really engages the reader near its conclusion, when it moves away from its initial structure.

In Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon, Mr. Parson's presents a unique, thoughtful, and fun narrative based on the real lives of the men and women who dominate the Internet's most prolific and strange subcultures. Though Mr. Parson's book is not filled with the kind of wacky, zany, random humor that one might expect from an Internet humor writer, its wry explorations of Internet subcultures, occasionally punctuated by laugh-out-loud moments, conclude in a very funny and surprising finale.

Even on the wings of "My Tank is Fight!", "Your Next Door Neighbor is a Dragon" comes as a surprise. Being a long time reader of Mr. Parson's articles online, I expected a satirical, yet frank and honest, look at internet subcultures. Which it is, of course. What I didn't expected was that the book was, in fact, a piece of Gonzo Journalism in the vein of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". And it succeeds spectacularly in this regard.

Parsons blends fact and fiction in such a way that everything in the book seems true, even the most insane and egregious imaginings that appear in it. No doubt this stems from the subject. Like Hunter S. Thompson's work, the subject of "Dragon" is already steeped in madness, yet it's real madness. It's easy to imagine men and women dressed in animal costumes and under the idea that they are inhabited by the spirits of dragons and elves fitting right in with Thompson's fever dream Vegas. All of this is linked together by an underlying narrative that strikes true, even if there's no way to tell where reality and fiction meet.

Especially given the subject matter, Parson's approach is even more unexpected. His writing humanizes (most of) his interviewees, yet never once forgets the fact that they are bouys in a sea of insanity and depravity, the best example being the chapter on Voraphilia. But it's not so heavy handed as to relent to pathos. The combination of Parson's frank but light-hearted tone, off-kilter associates and the increasingly insane scenarios in which he finds himself kept me in stitches from the first paragraph all the way to the end of what is possibly the longest acknowledgment section ever published. It's honestly one of the funniest books I've ever read, made more so by the fact that every bit of it is true, even the lies. Especially the lies.

While portions of this book feature some great descriptive prose familiar to those who have read Parson's articles, it still doesn't satisfyingly deliver on the premise that the book is selling--namely, an exploration of bizarre internet subcultures. The only chapter that fully delivered in this vein was the chapter on vores, as it thoughtfully analyzes and provides interesting insights about individuals from that subculture. Most chapters lack this insight and merely describe Zack visiting and aimlessly observing his intended subjects.
The entire final portion, in which Zack visits a cult, is not at all entertaining yet is so obviously fictional that it throws all of Zack's other accounts into doubt. Zack's reports cannot provoke thought because it's very likely a lot of them were exaggerated or made up. In the end, Zack manages to make some good jokes but frustratingly deprives his book of any statement or meaning.
Unlike Zack's articles, the book is also peppered with juvenile jokes and a "wacky" running gag about "Super God" in order to appeal to teens who prefer unsubtle and obvious humor. Feh.