May 22

May 22 The Atmospherians

Author: Alex McElroy
Publisher: Atria Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A “dazzling” (Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot ) and brilliantly satirical debut novel for fans of Women Talking and Red Clocks about two best friends — a disgraced influencer and a struggling actor — who form The Atmosphere, a cult designed to reform problematic men.

Sasha Marcus was once the epitome of contemporary success: an internet sensation, social media darling, and a creator of a high profile wellness brand for women. But a confrontation with an abusive troll has taken a horrifying turn, and now she’s at rock bottom: canceled and doxxed online, fired from her waitress job and fortressed in her apartment while men’s rights protestors rage outside. All that once glittered now condemns.

Sasha confides in her oldest childhood friend, Dyson — a failed actor with a history of body issues—who hatches a plan for Sasha to restore her reputation by becoming the face of his new business venture, The Atmosphere: a rehabilitation community for men. Based in an abandoned summer camp and billed as a workshop for job training, it is actually a rigorous program designed to rid men of their toxic masculinity and heal them physically, emotionally, and socially. Sasha has little choice but to accept. But what horrors await her as the resident female leader of a crew of washed up, desperate men? And what exactly does Dyson want?

Explosive and wickedly funny, this “Fight Club for the millennial generation” (Mat Johnson, author of Pym) peers straight into the dark heart of wellness and woke-ness, self-mythology and self-awareness, by asking what happens when we become addicted to the performance of ourselves.

TL;DR Review

The Atmospherians is a smart, satirical novel about toxic masculinity, body image, and influencer culture. I thought it was fun, dramatic, and impactful.

For you if: You like satire (…and are OK reading about eating disorders).

Full Review

Before I started The Atmospherians, all I knew about it was that it’s satire, and that the main character is a “disgraced influencer.” Being a person with a small ~internet presence~, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into (and it didn’t help that she lives in Hoboken, a little too close to me here in downtown Jersey City). In the end, though, this book is a super entertaining read, both comical and uncomfortable, impactful and disquieting.

The main character is named Sasha, and she preached a wellness routine she dubbed “Abandon,” which called for women to literally abandon all wellness products and practices (lol). But a careless comment caused her to plummet, fast, which might even be an understatement. Her former best friend, an actor, shows up and tells her they are going to found a cult dedicated to reforming toxic men, The Atmosphere.

A couple of big trigger warnings here, just FYI: eating disorders and disordered eating (there is graphic, near-reverent description of binging and purging), and suicide.

I thought this was a fun read that hit a little too close to reality (which the best satire does). It’s about not only toxic masculinity but also definitely body image and internet culture, especially influencers. It’s about the parts we play for ourselves and others. Now, I don’t tend to love the experience of reading *dramatic* books (which I know puts me in the minority), so there were times I struggled with it. But that’s definitely a me thing, because Alex McElroy wrote a book that’s smart and effective, and I think it absolutely does all that it intends to do.