They’ve been part of the same boisterous friend group since college, and they know that their breakup will devastate the others and make things more than a little awkward.

Wyn Connor and Harriet Kilpatrick were the perfect couple-until Wyn dumped Harriet for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand.

As Gerald dissociates further from reality in favor of endless cyberspace, he laments: “We’re not made to absorb this much human information at once.”Ī compulsively readable satire of modern corporate culture.Įxes pretend they’re still together for the sake of their friends on their annual summer vacation. Subplots about a PR catastrophe at a dog food company, an office hookup, and an employee haunted by mysterious “howling” offer varyingly interesting sendups of business life. Kasulke uses the line breaks and repetition of digital communication to stitch poetry out of textspeak, business lingo, adaptive chatbot phrases, and emojis-the latter represented by frustratingly clunky colon-bracketed text (“:thumbsup:”). Most of the conversations read incredibly quickly, even before the characters are sufficiently differentiated by typing style.

Kasulke adopts the epistolary format by restricting the action to Slack, composing his novel out of message threads titled by nickname (“#nyc-office”) or the list of participants (“Nikki, Pradeep, Louis C”). I’m just a bot, though!” Things get interesting when Gerald convinces his co-worker Pradeep to check on his absent body, and even more so when Slackbot discovers how to “help” Gerald. Meanwhile, Gerald frantically solicits help from Slackbot, the app’s troubleshooting AI, who initially only responds with preprogrammed messages like, “I can help by answering simple questions about how Slack works.

He doesn't know how his consciousness became trapped inside the business communication app, and he struggles to explain to his colleagues how he’s “just kinda, in here,” which he describes as “pretty existentially terrifying.”Gerald’s co-workers barely register his predicament, however they believe he's merely engaging in an elaborate bit to take advantage of the firm’s new work-from-home policy. Gerald, a mediocre employee of an unnamed PR firm, is stuck inside his company’s Slack channel. The petty trials and supernatural tribulations of a public relations firm are explored through its Slack conversations in this debut novel.

Several people are typing book