Influencers, but Make it a Gothic Novel
Unemployed entertainment writer Dayna Lev, age 39, knows she’s irrelevant to the Los Angeles media landscape. And when her longtime boyfriend (though he identifies “as a bachelor”) informs all of Reddit that he doesn’t want her and her beloved pet rabbit to move in, Dayna’s facing homelessness. This domestic drama kicks off If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You (Ballantine/Random House, $18). Dayna is reduced to contacting her onetime online acquaintance Craig Deckler, and accepting his offer of a live-in job at a house for “influencers.” Dayna’s is a story of art and commerce in the age of social media; novelist, poet, and memoirist Leigh Stein (Self Care and What to Miss When, among others) has written a contemporary gothic with a mordant wit.
Once a popular film location, the Deckler House mansion is now a crumbling “hype house” where would-be social media influencers Piper, Jake, Morgan, and Sean rent rooms. These young people spend their days creating and posting videos of themselves to a TikTok-like site referred to only as “the platform.” It’s Dayna’s job to help this crew, along with the newest house member, Olivia (her niche is she’s an orphan who can cry on demand), expand their audience and gain sponsors.
At first, it’s an uphill battle. Dayna’s befuddled by both the platform’s all-powerful algorithm and the residents’ live-streamed getting-ready-for-bed routines and derivative posts. A one-time aspiring photographer, Dayna came of age in a similarly self-absorbed but less consumer-oriented version of the Internet, where she’d posted mostly “high-contrast black- and-white photos of my collarbone.”
Social media has changed what it means to put pictures of yourself online, and when Dayna compares the carefully-composed photos she used to upload to a recent crop of pictures, she’s unimpressed: “That was art. This was content.” The Deckler House’s young residents are oblivious to the distinction; for them, sharing images of themselves on the Internet is a way to earn money advertising energy drinks.
As Dayna adjusts to the media’s latest frontier, the residents fight over who gets to use a pet rabbit in a video, stage a wedding for publicity, and video themselves dancing wildly to “the things people say when your parents die.” (After Olivia posts the latter, she notes, “This was how strangers would discover me on the For You page: grinding to my trauma.”) Meanwhile Dayna stumbles on an idea she believes will captivate the platform’s viewers: a search for Becca, a tarot influencer and former Deckler House resident who mysteriously disappeared several months ago.
The influencers are eager to find out what happened—in fact, it turns out that Olivia applied to the house in order to find Becca—and a fashion house agrees to use the search as an ad campaign starring the house and its residents. So when Craig shuts down the plan, Dayna pursues it behind his back. The residents quickly discover suggestive and worrying clues, including, ominously, prescription medication bottles with Becca’s name on them—in Craig’s drawer.
Dayna’s eager to exploit the mystery (and earn much-needed money), but she also starts to understand just how vulnerable these young people are, each with serious problems. Dayna isn’t used to nurturing anything other than her pet rabbit, and she’s appalled to realize “I was a vulture.”
In the gothic tradition, enigmatic men and sinister houses pose risks to young women. Think about the way novels by Daphne DuMaurier and Shirley Jackson examine gender roles. Stein’s If You’re Seeing This… references these tropes but subverts them, and the revelation at the novel’s heart turns what we think is a familiar story into something far more surprising and tender. The gothic’s essential sense of claustrophobia and looming menace emerge here from a newer threat: a mysterious and powerful algorithm. Both anonymous and incorporeal, it haunts the characters and drives their actions. As Olivia observes, “The algorithm was ravenous. We just had to keep feeding it, before it forgot we were alive.”
Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan lives in New York City, where she is usually reading. Her work has appeared in SELF, The Week, City Limits, and other titles.
