A new book by Logan Macnair delves into the dark extremes of social media characters, chat rooms and negative spiraling consequences of online conversations.
Macnair, who grew up in Williams Lake, is a professor at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C.
Troll is his second novel, and inspired from academic work he did to complete his PhD dissertation a couple of years ago.
His research looked at trying to understand why individuals get swept up in certain movements in the first place.
It was something that always fascinated him growing up on the internet himself and noticing how lots of people his age gravitated to online dark and extreme movements.
His intent was not to condone it, but to try and understand it.
“There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to say about it that I couldn’t really say through more official academic channels,” he said during an interview in Williams Lake while he was home visiting family. “I still had a lot of ideas I wanted to get out there so I put them in a somewhat fictional format even though it is very much based on real life.”
It is an ugly topic and not very pretty, and normally he prefers to keep his academic life separate from his artistic life, but said he was heavily involved with his research.
“Actually, it was difficult to get away from it, even at home, and it was always bouncing around in my head.”
Now that the book is published, he is less occupied with the topic and has had a bit of detox from the whole subject matter.
Something he said was really needed because looking at it day in and day out weighed heavily on him.
The main character Peter Riley is based on YouTube characters he observed in his research and wondered if they believed in the racist rants they were sharing in videos.
“Do they believe it? Or are they saying it because they know it is going to get them an audience? With that idea, I wondered about a character who didn’t believe in it but was just making it all up in this kind of dangerous game and putting on an act.”
It’s 2016 when Riley makes a video for a final theatre class project, calling himself Petrol Riley, a politically extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist.
Riley’s professor gives him a B for the video and suggests next time he might want to have some ebb and flow in the performance, rather than yelling the whole time.
On graduation day when Riley plans to get drunk with the friend who helped him make the video, the friend alerts him to the fact he’s got 40,000 views on the video and lots of fans who praise him for saying the things no one else has the guts too.
With that, he decides to devote his life to keeping Petrol alive, producing videos regularly, even making money doing it.
The more extreme his rhetoric becomes, the more loyal his fans become.
When a professor writes an article about how disturbing Petrol’s platform is, she becomes a target for his fans’ venom online.
As disturbing as some of the discussions and events that unfold in the novel are, Macnair said they are all based on a series of real events.
“I didn’t really have to make anything up. It’s all out there.”
People who have read the book have commented that it is dark and suggested he dramatized some aspects for effect, but he said if anything he has scaled them down from real events that have occurred.
The book ends on an ambiguous note with Macnair giving the reader some options, whether they be more cynical or the type to have faith in humanity.
Published by Now or Never Publishing, the book is available at The Open Book in Williams Lake.
A warning. It does have some disturbing content, especially to readers who may not venture down unpleasant rabbit holes of the internet.
“I did not write it with the intention of offending people, but it’s real and I want to shine a light on it and examine it from a few different angles,” Macnair said.
He works full-time teaching criminology courses at Douglas College and is working on a third book, this time about a small rural town in the early 90s, drawing a lot on his Williams Lake upbringing.
As he has been living in Vancouver since graduating from high school, it has taken time living in the city to realize how growing up in Williams Lake made him who he is and how he appreciates it now and loves coming back home to visit.
The third book takes place before the internet, he added.
His first book Paneygyric is about artistic integrity and unfulfilled ambition.
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monica.lamb-yorski@wltribune.com
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