Remember that series on The Toast, Children’s Stories Made Horrifying? Where you would be like, hmm, but that story is already kind of horrifying, and then you’d read the piece and be like, “Ah.” Bob Proehl’s sophomore novel, The Nobody People, is X-Men Made Horrifying.
Journalist Avi Hirsch is our way in to this story: An adrenaline junkie who’s done his best to settle down for his wife and kid, Avi is pursuing two seemingly unrelated stories, a bombing at a mall and another at a local black church. He learns that the man responsible has special powers, that there are more like him (though, mostly, not evil), and scariest of all, that Avi’s own daughter is one of them. The Nobody People spans the years after Avi’s discovery, as American society begins to learn of the existence of these so-called Resonants, and decides how they will respond. Along the way, Avi moves onto the sidelines of the story while other characters move to the front, notably a queer Muslim science genius Resonant, Fahima, and a graduate of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters the Bishop School called Carrie, whose ability is to turn invisible-ish.
The Nobody People is very much X-Men for a post-Trump era. Its turns to dystopia are hideously plausible, in part because they happen gradually. We open on a scene of violence in Appalachia, a family murdered because one of their sons used his power to open up a blockage in the mine. After Avi starts writing about the Resonant community for major publications, the backlash begins, spurred on by conservative talk show hosts and the existence of Resonants like the one who bombed the mall and the Baptist Church.
After that, the book is set up with small time jumps between sections (a year or two), which lets you discover the ways Resonants and humans alike have adjusted to their new normal. Early on, the only people clamoring for something to be done about the Resonants are cracks and conspiracy theorists. After a jump, the kids from the Bishop School have graduated and are living independently, forming Resonant conclaves within cities and walking among the normies (whom they call Damps) — though they remain fearful of government or vigilante interference in their lives, and there are whispers of Resonants being disappeared by men in white vans. Again and again, the characters and country adjust to a new normal, always hoping for / fearing the permanence of the status quo.
Even scarier than the country’s slide into exactly the kind of dystopia you’d expect is the fact that the characters don’t fail to see the dark futures they’re heading for. On the contrary, many of them can see it all too clearly, and they are working desperately to avert it. Only, in the Oedipus way that you’d expect, many of the steps they take to avert the grimmest futures only put them one step closer to disaster. Proehl does this very cleverly and (mostly) without editorializing, which highlights the impressive ambition and scale of this book.
All that said, and apart from a few pieces of white-guy-author-nonsense (lynching is a word with a really specific meaning and history! never ever ever ever ever have a narrator we’re supposed to like use the phrase young bucks to refer to young men!), I probably admired The Nobody People more than I loved it. This may just have been a function of its darkness; it’s hard in this darkest of timelines to read books in which nothing anybody does, no matter how good their intentions, no matter how awesome their brainpower, can save the day, or even come anywhere close to saving the day.