Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia
Jason Pargin
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250285935
St. Martin’s Press, October 2023, 416 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! For this month’s offering, we’ll be examining the third tale in a satirical universe of quippy prose and weird violence all in service of skewering the modern age—Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia.

This novel is the third in Jason Pargin’s Zoey Ashe universe, and while you don’t have to have read the first two to fully understand what’s happening, I highly recommend doing so because both are hilarious (the first is Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, and the second is Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, which might be the best book title of all time). All three deal with the titular character, Zoey, a poverty-stricken young adult who inherits a sprawling business corporation/wildly criminal organization from her deceased absent father, and then has to figure out what to do with her life as a newfound billionaire/mob boss now holding all the reins of power. The novels take place in chronological order, so you’ll miss out on some backstory elements if you jump straight in to Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia, but Pargin does an excellent job summing up characters and previous events when they matter to the story, so it’s not a major concern.

As far as what the story is about, well, the Zoey Ashe novels are primarily a means for Pargin to turn a no-holds barred eye on the idiocies and inadequacies of the modern age, and Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia delivers just as strongly as the first two entries. Ostensibly about Zoey’s travails trying to put on a large-scale music festival in a city (Tabula Ra$a) constantly on the edge of immolating itself, all while dealing with a series of horrific public crimes and an upcoming election, the actual, underlying subtext covers everything from democracy’s slide into fascism to performative religion to the shallow spectacle of always broadcasting reality living to what truth actually means in a post-truth society.

If that previous sentence seems like a lot to take in, well, much like the rest of Pargin’s writing, that’s what this book is like—a non-stop rollercoaster of ideas, musings, insights, and inanities that flow together into a wildly pleasing whole. There’s no real way to describe the Zoey Ashe books other than “some real weird stuff happens, but it’s clearly obvious that it’s based on the weird stuff that happens in the real world on a daily basis that we’ve somehow convinced ourselves is normal.” You could also legitimately describe Pargin’s writing as Terry Pratchett crossed with Hunter S. Thompson, in that it is an extremely candid view of the human condition, but one that feels like you’re on a lot of drugs that haven’t been named yet.

In terms of cast and crew, Pargin’s excellent dichotomy of “this person cannot possibly be real” and “I can absolutely believe this person is real” introduction of secondary, tertiary, and potential future primary characters remains fantastic, while at the same time he continues exploring both Zoey’s growth as well as the adopted family she’s surrounded herself with. I would like to say that all of the inhabitants of Tabula Ra$a feel three-dimensional, but that would be a lie, since most of them would probably break the laws of Euclidean physics if subjected to such frivolous concepts as “dimensions.” Suffice it to say, this book has characters, and they’ll stick with you long after you finish closing the cover.

The pacing of Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia is also suitably frenetic without being outright exhausting, with Zoey and company constantly lurching from near-disaster to near-disaster, each more unexpected than the last, but everything comes together in a satisfyingly neat conclusion that didn’t leave any threads hanging. I also felt that the world-building of Tabula Ra$a was just as entertaining as always—a suitably distorted mirror of all the worst (and best) parts of our increasingly intertwined physical and digital society.

Overall, if you’re looking for a book that will make you laugh, make you groan, make you angry, and most importantly, make you think, I cannot recommend Zoey Is Too Drunk For This Dystopia enough. For all of its feverish spectacle and rapid-fire conversations, the topics that Pargin addresses are ones that are well worth considering with care and deliberation. I really enjoyed this entry in the Zoey Ashe universe, and I hope there are more in the future.

Read if: you’ve ever felt in over your head; you’re more concerned with delivering help than doctrine; you want justice for Bandito.