Forgive me. It is utterly appalling that anyone should have to read a book review that begins like this. It really is. But there is just no shying away from the fact that Abby Horne, the 30-something protagonist of Jordan Prosser’s latest novel Blue Giant, desperately needs a good hangover shit.

It has been weeks since she last had a bowel movement and there are only so many bottles of Yellowtail Cabernet Sauvignon a tactless, crude, self-absorbed millennial can drink each night before the Riverina-rich tannins start leeching upwards into the decision-making part of her brain, convincing her she ought to take the task of saving humankind into her own hands.

Review: Blue Giant by Jordan Prosser (UQP)

Blue Giant is a satire. A commentary on 21st-century decadence in all its stinky, bloated, gaseous guises. It is the sort of book Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Chuck Palahniuk might have co-written if they had been living next door to Martin Amis in a Fitzroy sharehouse owned by Thomas Pynchon’s twice-removed Australian cousin, during the most recent Victorian bushfires.

A “deranged love letter to a generation torn between helplessness and selfishness”, as the blurb on the back cover so cutely puts it. The novel is funny, foreboding and outlandish. But only insofar as the meme-saturated world we live in is funny, foreboding and outlandish.

If you were not simultaneously amused and horrified by the sight of Jeff Bezos arriving back from space in a pair of cowboy boots emblazoned with the words “Gradatim Ferociter” (“step by step, ferociously”), or Elon Musk slashing governmental profligacy in half with a punk-studded chainsaw gifted to him by the Argentine president, or hordes of fangirls pledging their support via TikTok to accused murderer Luigi Mangione, this may........

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