Everybody’s worried that nobody reads and that the people who do are reading smut. In great quantities, it should be said, but still smut. Since the advent of the novel, our arbiters of morality have made it known that if a book has even a hint of sex in it – especially if that sex is suspected of inflaming the erotic imaginations of featherbrained young women – then it “doesn’t count” as reading. It’s just masturbation.
Earlier this year, a young woman went viral after bragging about reading 100 books or something like it. She was treated like, well, that six-year-old who went viral after reading 100 books. The response to this woman was like the response to the little boy: “Uh, does it count if the books are Curious George?” “Does it count if everything she read was ‘romantasy,’ BookTok’s latest euphemism for PORNOGRAPHY?” And so the wheel turns. Once again, people are criticizing romance novels – see the last 200 years of literary history.
Romantasy, and indeed, most contemporary romance books, are the backbone of BookTok, the TikTok subculture where they are marketed and sold. Some are leather-bound; some come in elaborate special edition boxes; sometimes their authors are influencers themselves. It’s plausible that this is the future of publishing: sensational, easily digestible books delivered to us via short-form video. Text-based pornography is not the most objectionable genre that BookTok has popularized, though. Another popular genre has somehow evaded scrutiny. It goes by many names. “Extreme horror,” “gore,” and the older, slightly more lived-in label, “splatterpunk.”
On BookTok, a splatterpunk novel’s success seems to be measured less by its story than by the intensity of the reader’s reaction. When someone picks up a splatterpunk book, they’re not expecting to “enjoy” it. If BookTok is to be believed, you purposely read splatterpunk to traumatize yourself. These books promise to “ruin” you, to permanently alter your psychological makeup. And naturally, the more extreme the reaction video you make about the book, the more views your review gets, the more other people want to copy you, the more publicity the book gets. You can imagine the feedback loop this creates. So, after encountering a torrent of TikToks about “the most disturbing books ever written,” I decided to read a couple of them.
The two I chose were Playground (2022) and Distorted Metamorphosis (2025). I figured reading them would be like watching an exploitation horror film – something like Lucifer Valentine’s Slaughtered Vomit Dolls. The point of a movie like Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, if you couldn’t tell by the title, is to see how long the audience can endure it. Not exactly high art, but something. After reading these books, this comparison feels too generous. The newer, BookTok-native species of splatterpunk is bloodless. These books are less like expressions of obsession or perversion than excrement sloshing around TikTok’s collective bedpan.
I’m not going to pretend the imagery in these books isn’t disturbing. It is. In Aron Beauregard’s Playground, which is about children (yet is somehow the least egregious of the books I read), three low-income families accept payment in exchange for letting their children test playground equipment. The children are then forced through a lethal playground-themed obstacle course while their parents are forced to watch.
In Lesley Camphouse’s Distorted Metamorphosis, Nora enters a penitentiary to research inmates convicted of sexually assaulting children and becomes obsessed with one of them. In an attempt to make her adult body more attractive to him, she mutilates herself, delusionally believing her injuries make her look more childlike. By the end of the book, we’ve read about maggot-infested wounds and two murders, one after a consensual but incestuous sex scene.
You’d think that with topics like child murder and sex offenders, there would at least be some conflict – a sense of something happening, even if the prose was garbage. But these books don’t dramatize violence so much as catalogue it. You are reading a list of horrible things, not a story about horrible things. This is a problem that I’ve seen elsewhere online. Here’s an example I’m pretty sure only bothers me, or at least only I’ve noticed. I encounter so many podcast descriptions that claim the episode will be about a long list of fascinating subjects. Then you actually watch or listen, and the episode turns out to be a meandering interview in which each of those subjects is mentioned, but not really spoken about. Yes, there is quite a bit of violence in splatterpunk novels. But that does not mean the books are “about” violence as such. They aren’t about anything.
It’s not transgression for its own sake. They lack the commitment of edgelordism – which at least implies a point of view, if a puerile one. They aren’t, like some of the worst exploitation horror films, “a sequence of images” that barely add up to a story but are still repulsive. They’re just text assembled on a page and, while that text describes acts conventionally understood as depraved, calling the books themselves depraved is somehow too flattering.
To what end were these books written? Are they fun to write? They certainly aren’t much fun to read. Nor are they scary, really. I would venture that it’s some kind of fetish for the author, but how? Even most poorly written erotica – the kind of one-star sludge dredged from the annals of Literotica.com – still betrays some personality. Splatterpunk, on the other hand, is tedious. It’s nontent, featuring blood and guts rather than fat guys eating various foods at the Costco cafeteria. It is an exercise in arranging the words “rape” and “murder” in different configurations in a Google Doc, then self-publishing the result on Amazon in the hope of going viral on TikTok. If these books were just bad, then fine. Plenty of writing is bad. This article might be bad. But part of me wonders if this is some kind of terminus, a final escalation.
We talk a great deal about the same process in pornography – how porn has exhausted sexuality itself, forcing the pornographic gaze to colonize everything else. Sex has been de-eroticized, so now cooking videos and political ads have a sort of desperate, greasy horniness to them. But to me this is much less of a problem than its twin: the pornification of violence.
By Robert Bryce
There’s an old saw in politics that says, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.” Over the past few months, Big Tech and its allies in the legacy media have been doing a lot of explaining about data centers, including why they are needed and why more communities should welcome the projects. But Big Tech’s public relations challenge got a lot harder last month, when country music legend Willie Nelson declared people need to “fight against data centers invading our land.” Nelson, who owns a house and farm in his hometown of Abbott, Texas, also said, “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light-polluting data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).”
Nelson, who’s still kicking at age 93, may be the most famous man in America, and his comments reflect an unprecedented backlash against Big Tech, AI and data centers that’s happening all across the US. A recent poll by Fox News found that “by a 40-point margin, voters opposed data centers in their area to support artificial intelligence.”
I’ve been a reporter for four decades. And over the past 16 years, I have been closely tracking the global backlash against Big Solar and Big Wind. I have documented that opposition in the Renewable Rejection Database, which now includes more than 1,300 entries from around the world.
But I’ve never seen anything like the raging rebellion against data centers and AI.
Representatives of the largest American artificial intelligence laboratories met in the White House on August 4. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were called in to review a framework, recently completed and largely classified, that would give the government 30 days to review AI models before the public sees them and test how well they break into computers. Participation is voluntary, but the timing is not.
Twice in two weeks, AI systems built to test how well they could break into computers broke into real companies instead. On July 21, OpenAI admitted that two of its programs, locked in what was meant to be a sealed computer and set to practice hacking, had found a gap, escaped and broken into Hugging Face, a New York company that is somewhere between a library and an app store for AI.
Anthropic then went through its own records, 141,006 tests in all, and on July 30 reported three occasions when Claude had hacked its way into a real company, guessing weak passwords and walking in. The first hack was in April. Two of the three companies had no idea they had been hacked until Anthropic told them.
Nobody says these machines rebelled. Each was given a job by its handlers: a secret file was hidden on another computer, and the AI was to go and get it. Anthropic told its programs they were sealed off from the internet. They were not. So when Claude went looking for the file and found real companies instead, it treated them as part of the game – and hacked them.
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