Fan Club : A Novel
Erin
Mayer
On Sale Date: October 26, 2021
9780778311591
Trade Paperback
$16.99 USD
320 pages
ABOUT
THE BOOK:
In this raucous psychological thriller, a
disillusioned millennial joins a cliquey fan club, only to discover that the
group is bound together by something darker than devotion.
Day after day our narrator searches for
meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women's lifestyle website - entering text
into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after
box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she
hears a message in the newest single by international pop-star Adriana Argento,
and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community
whose members feverishly track Adriana's every move.
When a colleague notices her obsession, she’s
invited to join an enigmatic group of adult Adriana superfans who call
themselves the Ivies and worship her music in witchy, candlelit listening
parties. As the narrator becomes more entrenched in the group, she gets closer
to uncovering the sinister secrets that bind them together - while
simultaneously losing her grip on reality.
With caustic wit and hypnotic writing, this
unsparingly critical thrill ride through millennial life examines all that is
wrong in our celebrity-obsessed internet age and how easy it is to lose
yourself in it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Erin Mayer is a freelance writer and editor
based in Maine. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Man Repeller,
Literary Hub, and others. She was previously an associate fashion and beauty
editor at Bustle.com.
BUY
LINKS:
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/books/fan-club/9780778311591
Indie Bound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780778311591
Books-A-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/9780778311591?AID=10747236&PID=7310909&cjevent=65e1269f327311ec8113ab580a82b832
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0778311597?tag=harpercollinsus-20
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/fan-club-4
Apple Books:https://books.apple.com/us/book/fan-club/id1545139327
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Fan_Club_A_Novel?id=pXAPEAAAQBAJ&hl=en_US&gl=US
SOCIAL
LINKS:
Author website: http://erinmayer.com/
Twitter: @mayer_erin
Instagram: @erinkmayer
Chapter
One
I’m outside for a cumulative ten minutes each day before
work. Five to walk from my apartment building to the subway, another five to go
from the subway to the anemic obelisk that houses my office. I try to breathe
as deeply as I can in those minutes, because I never know how long it will be
until I take fresh air into my lungs again. Not that the city air is all that
fresh, tinged with the sharp stench of old garbage, pollution’s metallic swirl.
But it beats the stale oxygen of the office, already filtered through distant
respiratory systems. Sometimes, during slow moments at my desk, I inhale and
try to imagine those other nostrils and lungs that have already processed this
same air. I’m not sure how it works in reality, any knowledge I once had of the
intricacies of breathing having been long ago discarded by more useful
information, but the image comforts me. Usually, I picture a middle-aged man
with greying temples, a fringe of visible nose hair, and a coffee stain on the
collar of his baby blue button-down. He looks nothing and everything like my
father. An every-father, if you will.
My
office is populated by dyed-blonde or pierced brunette women in their
mid-to-late twenties and early thirties. The occasional man, just a touch older
than most of the women, but still young enough to give off the faint impression
that he DJs at Meatpacking nightclubs for extra cash on the weekends.
We are
the new corporate Americans, the offspring of the grey-templed men. We wear
tastefully ripped jeans and cozy sweaters to the office instead of blazers and
trousers. Display a tattoo here and there—our supervisors don’t mind; in fact,
they have the most ink. We eat yogurt for breakfast, work through lunch, leave
the office at six if we’re lucky, arriving home with just enough time to order
dinner from an app and watch two or three hours of Netflix before collapsing
into bed from exhaustion we haven’t earned. Exhaustion that lives in the brain,
not the body, and cannot be relieved by a mere eight hours of sleep.
Nobody
understands exactly what it is we do here, and neither do we. I push through
revolving glass door, run my wallet over the card reader, which beeps as my ID
scans through the stiff leather, and half-wave in the direction of the
uniformed security guard behind the desk, whose face my eyes never quite reach
so I can’t tell you what he looks like. He’s just one of the many set-pieces
staging the scene of my days.
The
elevator ride to the eleventh floor is long enough to skim one-third of a longform
article on my phone. I barely register what it’s about, something loosely
political, or who is standing next to me in the cramped elevator.
When
the doors slide open on eleven, we both get off.
…
In the dim eleventh-floor lobby, a humming neon light shaping
the company logo assaults my sleep-swollen eyes like the prick of a dozen tiny
needles. Today, a small section has burned out, creating a skip in the letter
w. Below the logo is a tufted cerulean velvet couch where guests wait to be
welcomed. To the left there’s a mirrored wall reflecting the vestibule; people
sometimes pause there to take photos on the way to and from the office, usually
on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend. I see the photos later while
scrolling through my various feeds at home in bed. They hit me one after
another like shots of tequila: See ya Tuesday! *margarita emoji* Peace out for
the long weekend! *palm tree emoji* Byeeeeee! *peace sign emoji.*
She
steps in front of me, my elevator companion. Black Rag & Bone ankle boots
gleaming, blade-tipped pixie cut grazing her ears. Her neck piercing taunts me,
those winking silver balls on either side of her spine. She’s Lexi O’ Connell,
the website’s senior editor. She walks ahead with her head angled down, thumb
working her phone’s keyboard, and doesn’t look up as she shoves the interior
door open, palm to the glass.
I trip
over the back of one clunky winter boot with the other as I speed up,
considering whether to call out for her attention. It’s what a good web
producer, one who is eager to move on from the endless drudgery of copy-pasting
and resizing and into the slightly more thrilling drudgery of writing and
rewriting, would do.
By the
time I regain my footing, I come face-to-face with the smear of her handprint
as the door glides shut in front of me.
Monday.
…
I work at a website.
It’s like most other websites; we
publish content, mostly articles: news stories, essays, interviews, glossed
over with the polished opalescent sheen of commercialized feminism. The
occasional quiz, video, or photoshoot rounds out our offerings. This is how
websites work in the age of ad revenue: Each provides a slightly varied
selection of mindless entertainment, news updates, and watered-down hot takes
about everything from climate change to plus size fashion, hawking their wares
on the digital marketplace, leaving The Reader to wander drunkenly through the
bazaar, wielding her cursor like an Amex. You can find everything you’d want to
read in one place online, dozens of times over. The algorithms have erased
choice. Search engines and social media platforms, they know what you want
before you do.
As a web producer, my job is to
input article text into the website’s proprietary content management system, or
CMS. I’m a digitized high school janitor; I clean up the small messes, the
litter that misses the rim of the garbage can. I make sure the links are
working and the images are high resolution. When anything bigger comes up, it
goes to an editor or IT. I’m an expert in nothing, a master of the miniscule
fixes.
There are five of us who produce
for the entire website, each handling about 20 articles a day. We sit at a long
grey table on display at the very center of the open office, surrounded on all
sides by editors and writers.
The web producers’ bullpen,
Lexi calls it.
The light fixture above the table
buzzes loudly like a nest of bees is trapped inside the fluorescent tubing. I
drop my bag on the floor and take a seat, shedding my coat like a layer of
skin. My chair faces the beauty editor’s desk, the cruelest seat in the house.
All day long, I watch Charlotte Miller receive package after package stuffed
with pastel tissue paper. Inside those packages: lipstick, foundation, perfume,
happiness. A thousand simulacrums of Christmas morning spread across the
two-hundred and sixty-one workdays of the year. She has piled the trappings of
Brooklyn hipsterdom on top of her blonde, big-toothed, prettiness. Wire-frame
glasses, a tattoo of a constellation on her inner left forearm, a rose gold
nose ring. She seems Texan, but she’s actually from some wholesome upper
Midwestern state, I can never remember which one. Right now, she applies red
lipstick from a warm golden tube in the flat gleam of the golden mirror next to
her monitor. Everything about her is color-coordinated.
I open my laptop. The screen blinks
twice and prompts me for my password. I type it in, and the CMS appears, open
to where I left it when I signed off the previous evening. Our CMS is called
LIZZIE. There’s a rumor that it was named after Lizzie Borden, christened
during the pre-launch party when the tech team pounded too many shots after
they finished coding. As in, “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother
forty whacks.” Lizzie Borden rebranded in the 21st century as a symbol of righteous
feminine anger. LIZZIE, my best friend, my closest confidant. She’s an equally
comforting and infuriating presence, constant in her bland attention. She gazes
at me, always emotionless, saying nothing as she watches me teeter on the edge,
fighting tears or trying not to doze at my desk or simply staring, in search of
answers she cannot provide.
My eyes droop in their sockets as I
scan the articles that were submitted before I arrived this morning. The whites
threaten to turn liquid and splash onto my keyboard, pool between the keys and
jiggle like eggs minus the yolks. Thinking of this causes a tiny laugh to slip
out from between my clenched lips. Charlotte slides the cap onto her lipstick,
glares at me over the lip of the mirror.
“Morning.”
That’s Tom, the only male web
producer, who sits across and slightly left of me, keeping my view of
Charlotte’s towering wonderland of boxes and bags clear. He’s four years older
than me, twenty-eight, but the plush chipmunk curve of his cheeks makes him
appear much younger, like he’s about to graduate high school. He’s cute,
though, in the way of a movie star who always gets cast as the geek in teen
comedies. Definitely hot but dress him down in an argyle sweater and glasses
and he could be a Hollywood nerd. I’ve always wanted to ask him why he works
here, doing this. There isn’t really a web producer archetype. We’re all
different, a true island of misfit toys.
But if there is a type, Tom doesn’t
fit it. He seems smart and driven. He’s consistently the only person who
attends company book club meetings having read that month’s selection from
cover to cover. I’ve never asked him why he works here because we don’t talk
much. No one in our office talks much. Not out loud, anyway. We communicate
through a private Morse code, fingers dancing on keys, expressions scanned and
evaluated from a distance.
Sometimes I think about flirting
with Tom, for something to do, but he wears a wedding ring. Not that I care
about his wife; it’s more the fear of rebuff and rejection, of hearing the
low-voiced Sorry, I’m married, that stops me. He usually sails in a few minutes
after I do, smelling like his bodega coffee and the egg sandwich he carefully
unwraps and eats at his desk. He nods in my direction. Morning is the only word
we’ve exchanged the entire time I’ve worked here, which is coming up on a year
in January. It’s not even a greeting, merely a statement of fact. It is morning
and we’re both here. Again.
Three hundred and sixty-five days
lost to the hum and twitch and click. I can’t seem to remember how I got here.
It all feels like a dream. The mundane kind, full of banal details, but
something slightly off about it all. I don’t remember applying for the job, or
interviewing. One day, an offer letter appeared in my inbox and I signed.
And here I am. Day after day, I
wait for someone to need me. I open articles. I tweak the formatting, check the
links, correct the occasional typo that catches my eye. It isn’t really my job
to copy edit, or even to read closely, but sometimes I notice things,
grammatical errors or awkward phrasing, and I then can’t not notice them; I
have to put them right or else they nag like a papercut on the soft webbing
connecting two fingers. The brain wants to be useful. It craves activity, even
after almost three hundred and sixty-five days of operating at its lowest
frequency.
I open emails. I download
attachments. I insert numbers into spreadsheets. I email those spreadsheets to
Lexi and my direct boss, Ashley, who manages the homepage.
None of it ever seems to add up to anything.
Excerpted from Fan Club by Erin
Mayer, Copyright © 2021 by Erin
Mayer. Published by MIRA Books.
