Virgins in Reverse/The Intrusion is a joint set of novellas written by Gabriel Hart. While they are marketed as two separate entities, they are very much married in characters, context, and theme. In fact, I can’t imagine one existing without the other.
My emotional journey through these works was fraught. The stories are very much in my genre wheelhouses, pulling from post-noir, ghost/possessions, and the beats. They’re also filled with rhythmic, verbose prose. Hart paints tiny pictures with every sentence to make up a coherent and comprehensive tone throughout. All of this is like candy to me.
On the other hand, the main character is rather obnoxious, the side characters are stereotypical, and the ending was… Well, let’s start from the beginning, shall we?
Virgins in Reverse
Suggested Listening:
Start with – Link Wray
End with – Wasted Youth or The Germs
At the opening of the novel, the main character, Caleb, a late-twenty-something, self-described degenerate, is living in L.A. and gets a job at an independent movie theatre.
I could have spent the whole first novella at this theatre, largely because my first job was at an independent movie theatre in Southern California. Hart captures the culture so well. The inter-coworker drama and camaraderie. The total apathy toward customers and actual work. The management that takes it all a little too seriously, while maintaining a kitschy other-era-ness that doesn’t quite fit their attitude. Yeah, it’s all there.
While working at the theatre, Caleb gets a crush on a woman named Cecilia. Actually, everyone at the theatre has a crush on Cecilia. And here ensues one of my biggest issues with the work on-whole. All of the characters are homogenous and have few differentiators from the main character outside of stereotypes.
The Characters
First, extending the benefit of the doubt, I assumed this was intentional on the author’s part. We are, after all, experiencing this first-person story from Caleb’s perspective whose infantile viewpoint may lead him to believe that everyone has a crush on the same girl as him (and that everyone sees the world the same way he does more generally).
However, upon finishing both works, I’ve come to the conclusion that the side characters just aren’t as rich as they could be. They lack desires and motivations. They’re simply props to serve the main character’s self-indulgent narrative.
Caleb’s crush on Cecilia ultimately consumes both the characters’ thoughts and the narrative of the work. The naïve elation Caleb experiences transforms him into an endearing character for a period. No longer wallowing in his own cockroach-like, bottom-feeding tendencies, Caleb becomes someone I can relate to. Someone I can root for.
He eventually “gets the girl,” and here, Caleb’s story takes a turn for the worst. Over the rest of Virgins in Reverse, the rose-colored glasses through which he once viewed Cecilia devolves into deep contempt, resentment, and blame.
At the end of this first novella, the main character falls into total decrepitude. From his perspective, Caleb has given all agency to Cecilia, the dark queen of cuntery and malicious cluelessness. Her happiness is his pain. Her offense his burden. Her freedom his imprisonment.
The Writing
All of this darkness, entitlement, and utter lack of agency is told through gorgeous prose. Sentences are packed with multiple surprising metaphors in rapid succession. It put my neurons in overdrive and kept me craving the next line throughout.
Gabriel (author) is also a musician. His ear for rhythm and melody underline the vivid imagery he musters with these two-word metaphors, alliteration, and expert pacing. Punchy and graceful in all the right places, the prose itself is the star of the work.
Casual, off-hand observations were sharp and penetrating. One sentence immediately comes to mind:
“She wanted normal and boring and she got domestic abuse, which in many worlds is normal, boring…”
Here’s a taste of the prose with some of my favorite lines from the first novella:
- “Her crying was loud, scattered, and unquenchable as a newborn, layered in thick and fluctuating rhythms.”
- “Every time I heard it I could only imagine gaggles of women with knives stabbing downwards to the rhythm of ‘I love him! I love him! I love him!’”
- “… passing the wine like a lazy metronome…”
- “My stomach dropped with hybrid shock and excitement…”
- “The Milky Way, smeared across the heavens like discarded jism, dodging the bullet, the penetrating sting of impregnation, of a new life, unwanted, unwarranted.”
Conclusion
The ride of Virgins in Reverse is fun, wild, and poetically disillusioned in the lineage of Bukowski’s Women and Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero. Where it lacks is in character.
The side characters are flat and stereotype reliant. Trans folks, sex workers, and BIPOC are all described as disgusting in one way or another or are cringey in their lack of originality.
(The only Black character, for instance, is called “Bluesman.” And, though Caleb saves him from racist skinheads, we don’t even get to know where Bluesman ends up thereafter. Is Bluesman okay? I want to know!)
Meanwhile, Caleb, the main character, is inconsistent. Both refusing responsibility or agency, playing the victim and blaming circumstance, while also getting to play the champion to women and Black folk in key scenes where he lapses into momentary white-savior heroics.
The Intrusion
Suggested listening:
Start with – Scott Hallgren
End with – Iannis Xenakis (Metastaseis to be precise)
The Intrusion is the second novella and (in my humble opinion) superior to the first. In The Intrusion, Hart embraces his beatnik, stream-of-consciousness sensibilities, and gives the main character some much-needed self-awareness. It also has a lot less cringey stereotyping, which made for a more enjoyable read overall.
In this novella, the themes Hart continually returns to come into focus. Themes of home, group cohesion, loneliness, and a drive toward destruction. I also found the main character more bearable since he no longer had a woman to blame for all his ills. Though he still lacks agency, Caleb finds a new, much more mysterious source for his sufferings.
The two aspects of The Intrusion that truly set it above Virgins in Reverse is that
a) Hart did not hold back on his strength – the prose, and
b) it had an air of suspense in the unknown which made the plot itself more compelling.
The Plot
In this part, Caleb is living with friends and continues to drown himself in alcohol, blacking out and allowing some primal part of himself control his behavior as his conscious self is suppressed by the booze.
Caleb becomes convinced that his drinking is a conduit for a literal spirit to enter and control his physical body. This results in increasingly outrageous outbursts. In a final, tone-shifting, drunken outburst, Caleb attempts suicide by throwing himself out of a window and onto hard, “unforgiving” concrete.
The Character
This brings about two sections of pure, dark, reflective, stream-of-conscious joy (for the reader that is). There’s also a big change in perspective here as Caleb starts speaking in second person, addressing us (the reader) directly. At this point, it seems that Caleb’s awareness of being observed is what brings about this sudden self-awareness.
This is stated pretty directly along with some of Caleb’s driving motivations. He calls out that “A metamorphosis has taken place,” recalls that in the past he’d “wanted to be a man,” and that he can’t deny that in his destructive friend group he sees “my own warped reflection.”
Nowhere is this transformation and his growing self-awareness clearer than when he says, “You could say I am wiser now, but only because at this very moment I know myself too well. But acquiring wisdom should never be equated with being cured…”
After these page turning chapters of musical stream-of-conscious, we come to the end of the story where Caleb seeks help.
The End
I’m not going to go into detail here, you’ll have to read the book to find out what really happens. What I can say is that there is a brief moment of optimism that Caleb’s personal reflection may grow into actualized personal development.
I should have known better.
The “professional help” that Caleb seeks soon degrades into more debauchery, manipulation, distorted reality, boundary crossing, and ends more morbid than that. In the end, Caleb’s sickness overcomes him and we (the readers) are left a little confused and incredibly unnerved.
Overall, The Intrusion was an honest depiction of Caleb. Where Virgins in Reverse tried to salvage Caleb’s character, The Intrusion destroyed any hope or effort to turn Caleb into something else. Where Virgins in Reverse screams “Caleb’s a cockroach” while also makes him the white knight, The Intrusion creates true suspense as we root for Caleb’s recovery and he pummels toward his true, fully actualized self.
The Intrusion has an authenticity that Virgins in Reverse lacks.
Recommendation
The Intrusion is an enjoyable, quick read filled with strong, dark tones and poetic, musical prose. Virgins in Reverse is less enjoyable and a lot more problematic, but necessary to give context to The Intrusion.
If you’ve been struggling with the end times and need something light or optimistic, maybe wait on this one.
If you’re like me and nothing helps you escape from real-life terror better than fictional horror, Virgins in Reverse/The Intrusion is a punchy, explosive ride evoking Ellis, Bukowski, Hammett, and even a little Kafka at times. It’s pulp, flash, and a unique exploration of a certain brand of modern masculinity where young men feel entitled to everything, responsible for nothing, and disillusioned by society writ large.
Read this book in a dark, dusty corner of your basement or garage (I’d say dive bar, but that’s an impossibility right now) with an Irish coffee, a pack of filterless Lucky Strikes, and dissonant music playing a little louder than you’d like it to.
Your Artful Effort
Buy the book of course! Here’s the link!
Check out the author, Gabriel Hart’s website, here.
Connect with him on Twitter, here.
And continue supporting independent artists through buying their work and sending them tips through these crazy end-times.
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