The Future Won't Be Long, by Jarett Kobek

Staff review by Chris Saliba

A dizzying trip through New York's underground scene of the 1980s and 90s.

It's 1986. A gay eighteen-year-old farmboy leaves his Wisconsin home after his parents die in strange circumstances. He renames himself Baby, moves to New York and on his first night meets the flamboyant Adeline. She is only slightly older than him and talks like a campy Hollywood actress of the silver screen era. Soon the two are inseparable and will take their friendship on a rollercoaster ride through the following decade.

Jarett Kobek's The Future Won't Be Long works almost as a prequel to his previous novel, I Hate the Internet. The story is alternatively narrated by Baby, who will eventually become a science fiction writer (among other things) and Adeline, who makes a name for herself as a comic book artist. A dizzying glitterball of a book, one that seems to spin faster and faster, Kobek brings to life the drugs, sex, nightclubs, artists, writers, drag queens and oddballs that made up New York's underground scene of the 1980s and 90s. In between the parties and name dropping (with appearances from Quentin Crisp, Norman Mailer, David Wojnarowicz, Brett Easton Ellis etc.) there is plenty of biting commentary on the many ills of American society.

Brilliant and genre-busting, The Future Won't Be Long is like nothing you've read before.

The Future Won't Be Long, by Jarett Kobek. Published by Serpent's Tail. ISBN: 9781781258552  RRP: $32.99

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