Airini Beautrais
How to Disappear Completely by Nicholas Sheppard (Eunoia Publishing, 2023), 190pp, $35
The lone mass shooter is a familiar figure from news media and also the focus of various works of recent fiction. He surfaces in novels such as Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, published in 2003, and numerous young adult novels. He is featured in films, like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (also from 2003), and in songs, like Foster The People’s ironically upbeat, poppy ‘Pumped-Up Kicks’ (2010). It’s fair to use the pronoun ‘he’, as 97.7% of American mass shooters between 1966 and 2019 were male, according to research funded by the US Department of Justice.
What motivates the mass shooter? Researcher Jillian Peterson, who led the research team that built the 1966–2019 database, has identified a few common themes, including early childhood trauma, such as domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, isolation, and self-loathing. ‘Many of them are suicidal and attempt suicide before doing a mass shooting’, Peterson has said in an interview. ‘Then that self-loathing kind of turns outward and it becomes whose fault is this? Who do I blame for the fact that I feel this way? So school shooters blame their school. Workplace shooters blame their workplace. Other people blame religious groups, or racial groups, or women.’
Jack, the protagonist in Nicholas Sheppard’s 2023 novel How To Disappear Completely, fits the above profile fairly closely. He’s a young man with a largely absent father, who suffers from severe social anxiety. He lives with his mother, who has chronic fatigue and is unaware of, or unable to help with, Jack’s psychological state. He’s faced romantic disappointment, has dropped out of university, and spends almost all his time hunched over a computer in his mother’s basement, gaming, watching extreme pornography, smoking weed, drinking energy drinks, and conversing online with fellow incels and extremists, or engaging in vitriolic debates with feminists. He holds some racist, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic opinions and has come to sympathise with aspects of Nazi ideology.
Why write from the perspective of this character? Why go into the motivations and philosophies behind his actions? How To Disappear Completely is a moral, philosophical novel—not a project for the faint-hearted writer or reader. The book’s blurb states that it poses ‘the question, ultimately, of whether a monster is born or bred.’ In investigating that question, Sheppard has chosen to alternate between the points of view of two characters (both in the third person, with the sense of a somewhat omniscient and detached narrator hovering behind them). There’s Jack, the basement-dwelling loner and budding white supremacist, and there’s Clayton, a Black social worker with a strong sense of social justice who is always ready to go above and beyond for his clients. Clayton and Jack cross paths for the first time when Jack’s mother calls Clayton’s social work agency for support; Jack’s hostility and the reading material evident in the house inspire concern in Clayton, but a heavy caseload and lack of concrete evidence limits any preventative or restorative measures he can put in place. They will turn out to be connected again, by chance, via the climactic events of the novel.
The setting for the novel is New Haven, Connecticut. Sheppard’s bio states that he has dual United States and New Zealand citizenship, which partly explains this choice. American gun laws are different to those in Aotearoa, and mass shootings are a chillingly frequent event in that country (although most US gun deaths are suicides). Reading the novel, I had the sense that both characters had been researched in detail, and written sensitively. We get deeper into Jack’s thoughts, memories and ideology, as he has very limited face-to-face interactions with other people. Clayton’s perspective is shown through his everyday experience, working with clients from a variety of backgrounds and with issues requiring his support. Generally, this structure works, although sometimes it’s difficult to tease out the shifts between present-day and flashbacks in Jack’s sections.
Is Jack really a ‘monster’? He’s portrayed as a relatively intelligent character, literate and familiar with Shakespeare, Dickens and Rimbaud. He loves fine art and classical music and theorises about the decline of Western culture. (He also has a very typical 1990s listening repertoire of grunge, alternative rock and trip-hop, which is odd-seeming for a character who is of college age, presumably now or in the very recent past—actually, it was somewhat discomforting to read the descriptions, as he plans his violent acts, of the soundtrack of my own teenage years).
Like many real-life alt-right figures, Jack is a big fan of Nietzsche (all his online handles contain misspellings of ‘Nietzsche’), but he has, ‘like thousands of other undergraduates’ abandoned his freshman Nietzsche text halfway through. Nevertheless, he’s based his personal philosophies on his own interpretations of Nietzschean ideas: ‘It was necessary for higher men to make war upon the masses, because everywhere, mediocre men were unifying to make themselves masters. Inferior men, the socialists who championed the workmen and the poor: all those movements were to be resisted.’ He appears to subscribe to the ‘red pill’ ideas of the ‘alpha male’ and the ‘beta cuck’, championing masculinity as a force for good, driven to rage by reading descriptions of university courses with names like ‘Gender in Gaming’ and ‘Troubling Whiteness’. His favourite novel is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which is an interesting authorial choice. But this novel doesn’t go into punishment.
Perhaps the best insight into Jack’s psychology is the letter he writes to a classmate he has overheard ranting about white male privilege:
I’ll tell you what I know about entitlement. I’ve never had the entitlement of a father who stuck around, to be a role model and look out for me. I’ve never known the entitlement of being raised by a mom who was healthy and had the energy to make our household what it should have been through the years of my childhood … You think you’re enlightened, and that I can learn from you and begin to embrace the idea of diminishing myself. You don’t know shit about it.
We also get illuminating glimpses via his online arguments, collaged into the text, which come across as so believable they might have been taken, word for word, from real online forums. There’s a sense of the culture wars phenomenon of polarised people talking past each other, devolving into insults, each believing in the other’s absolute wrongness. This is certainly a valid subject for investigation, in fiction or otherwise: there is not a lot of evidence that confrontation and verbal abuse can encourage a person to change their mind on a political matter.
Clayton and Jack (who, in fact, remains nameless until the very end of the book) are both believable characters, able to inspire empathy in the reader. I would have liked to know more about Harriett, Clayton’s partner, who faces her own challenges, and Katie, Jack’s high school love interest, who is only faintly sketched. As one of Jack’s online rivals argues: ‘There’s really hardly any difference between men and women—except when it comes to equal pay.’ I don’t think the novel would lose anything by further development of its female characters. Another character I would have been interested to hear more about was Jack’s father. Why did his parents divorce? Was his father violent? Jack seems like a traumatised character in a lot of ways, but the flashbacks to his childhood seem relatively mild: being left to manoeuvre a boat alone on a seaside vacation, okay, or being tickled mercilessly by some older boys, hmmm. But perhaps that’s the point here—that even a relatively mild upbringing can lead to an extreme ideology if all the other factors fall into place?
At times there is a lot of back-story attached to minor characters, which ends up summarised in a somewhat journalistic manner; for example, an extended foray into the background of charity worker Sadia and her friend Salen, who has died on a shipyard in Bangladesh. Their stories are undoubtedly tragic and add to an overall picture of the injustices of a globalised world; however, I thought this could have been worked into the story in a more natural way. There are also some instances of telling rather than showing the main characters, particularly Jack. Near the end of the novel, we are told: ‘Like the child who upends the checkerboard when he does not like the way the game is going, he wanted to hurt others for failing to recognise and meet his needs.’ This is certainly true in the reality of the story, but the blunt wording detracts from the gravity of the situation at hand, for me.
Sheppard’s novel is definitely thought-provoking. It made me think a lot, and I was inspired to do some further reading around its themes. I can imagine it as a good novel for high school seniors to study: despite some stylistic inconsistencies, it provides a good framework for consideration and discussion and ultimately tells an intriguing, if tragic, story.
AIRINI BEAUTRAIS is a Whanganui-based writer and teacher. Her collection of stories, Bug Week (Victoria University Press, 2020), won the 2021 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction at the Ockham NZ Book Awards. Her most recent book is a collection of essays, The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024).
The headline “Alpha Male” is inappropriate. The central figure here, and so many others like him, are emphatically not alpha males, and are all too acutely aware of this. Alpha males, while not personally shooting people, can be even more dangerous, including on a global scale.
Thank you for your comment. Please read the review all the way through before leaping to conclusions and taking umbrage. The title of the review is clearly ironic and implies the opposite, as the following sentence in the review explains, when read carefully all the way through: He appears to subscribe to the ‘red pill’ ideas of the ‘alpha male’ and the ‘beta cuck’, championing masculinity as a force for good, driven to rage by reading descriptions of university courses with names like ‘Gender in Gaming’ and ‘Troubling Whiteness’.