"Death, IRL, is the final cancellation"
When I requested a review copy of Gigantvm Penisivm, it’s fair to say that I wasn’t expecting a literary tome that tackled its themes with gravitas. From award-winning Filipino author, Jose Elvin Bueno, this novel is billed by publisher Clash Books as a satire on social media influencers and most intriguingly “A24’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodies meets Talk To Me“. My interest was piqued and I saw the potential for a whacky “I-can’t-believe-what-I-just-read” book.
Rafa, Basti, Vicente, Pia, and Mitzi are a group of vacuous social media-addicted influencers: a fin-tech wunderkind; an OnlyFans pornstar; an Instagram model; and so on) who get together on a Friday to stave off the ennui of their privileged lives with drugs and alcohol. The characters are all obsessed with their metrics of online engagement (or as the author puts it amusingly, their “anals and algos”). Basti suggests a demonic summoning to liven things up, using the obscene incantation “Gigantvm Penisivm”. Things go predictably south from there when the spirit possesses each character one by one. After a few chapters with these odious self-obsessed characters, I was more than ready for them to get bumped off in the time-honoured tradition of a trashy horror movie. Sadly, I have to file this novel comfortably in the “not for me” box and I will not be recommending this in good faith to anyone I know.
In the defence of Gigantvm Penisivm (a phrase that you probably won’t find anywhere else on the internet), the premise offers rich potential for satire and social commentary. The early chapters stress the importance of names and draw an interesting parallel between social media handles and the horror trope that if you know a demon’s name, then you have a degree of power and control over it. Characters are referred to by their @-tags throughout the book: an interesting convention at first, but it gets tiring quickly. There’s a suggestion of interplay between the followers/followed and the influencer/influenced, which I was anticipating would be teased out in the context of a horror story about demonic possession.
The book also comments on the importance of telling your own story (or Story, like on Instagram, geddit?) and maintaining a strong authorial voice. The whole narrative is framed as a story that is playing out for the online viewers (and by extension, the voyeur that is the reader). I was anticipating some unreliable narrator shenanigans here, and I’m always here for that.
In short, I started to expect too much from a book of this title.
It’s unusual that I can pinpoint the exact point that I mentally check out of a book, but I can tell you that I knew none of my early optimism for Gigantvm Penisivm was going to be fulfilled when I read the word “milkers” used to describe a character’s breasts. There’s no coming back from that.
This book crawled along at snail’s pace. It is narrated in the first person by both Rafa and Mitzi who alternate chapters. It doesn’t take long to realise that narrator 2 is describing exactly the same events that narrator 1 has just told you, chapter by chapter. I was expecting there to be conflict between the two voices as they began to contradict one another, making you question who to believe - but alas there was no discernable reason for this device, making for a tedious and frustrating read where very little of interest happens.
It wasn’t always easy to tell the narrative voices apart, so there are key phrases repeated throughout to establish the character’s POV. Unfortunately this means that the phrase “that adorable slut” and “that r*tard” are used multiple times. The r-slur appears nearly 30 times in this 267-page book. It’s 2024; there’s no excuse for this and it adds nothing to the book. Another recurring motif is that every mention of the word “influencer” is stylised as “f**k this word, influencer”. I read this phrase more times than I cared to count. In fact, repetition is a major theme of this book and it didn’t feel intentional.
And what of the actual possession? Reader beware, SPOILERS lie ahead so please stop here if you don’t want to know more about this book’s plot.
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Our group of feckless influencers succeed in summoning up the world’s dullest spirit. Upon taking control of each character’s body, the spirit cites lengthy passages of legislature, strips them of their money (which they apparently give up voluntarily; perhaps demons accept crypto as currency these days?) and imposes martial law. It transpires that the demon is none other than Ferdinand Marcos, former President of the Phillippines. I am not at all familiar with Filipino politics, so I may well have entirely missed the satire here. I understand that the actions of the possessed mirror the real-life decrees of Marcos, who ruled as a corrupt dictator for 14 years. Someone less ignorant of this part of the world may get a lot more out of this novel than I did.
The Gigantvm Penisivm has very little bearing on the story thankfully, until the final pages of the novel which, apropos of nothing, include a graphic sex scene between Marcos and the pornstar character. My research on whether this is based on any historical fact has proved inconclusive.
I wanted so badly to DNF this book but I made myself finish it. There is no horror here, and worse still there is no satire or humour. I count myself lucky that there was no punning on the phrase “brand penetration” - a missed opportunity, if you ask me
If you want to experience this for yourself, Gigantvm Penisivm was published on 5th November and is available as a paperback or on Kindle from Amazon. Thank you to Netgalley and Clash Books for providing me with this ARC and I can only apologise for my honest review.
