A review by brnineworms
Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right by Jack Graham, Elizabeth Sandifer

dark funny informative medium-paced

2.5

God, I had such high hopes for this one. I suppose, in that sense, I am partially to blame for the disappointment I’m feeling right now.

The strengths and shortcomings of the titular essay can be found repeated throughout the collection. I want to start with those strengths. This book was one of the funniest I’ve read recently, and it was genuinely thought-provoking at times. The extended mythological framing was neat, and the tangents about Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blake’s The Book of Urizen, though largely irrelevant, were undeniably interesting.
I think my favourite chapter was Theses on a President, which was closer to prose than it was to an essay. Sandifer’s writing style worked well there.

It’s less well-suited to her essays, however. The acerbic wit that enthralled me at the start soon became pure venom. Anger about neoreaction is understandable and justified, but she doesn’t harness that anger properly. Her writing is tarnished with rampant ableism, mockery of drug addicts, and a few homophobic jabs for good measure.
Something that’s hard to ignore is the way Sandifer falls in step with the figures she condemns. Not ideologically, of course – I’m by no means accusing her of being a cryptofascist – only in the sense that she dances the same rhythms of performative “pwnage” and she tries to beat neoreactionaries at their own games, which means she’s always playing defence. She tries to poke holes in their logic but, as the saying goes, you cannot reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. I feel like these are fairly obvious blunders that anyone familiar enough with the alt-right to feel confident writing an entire book about it should have known to avoid. It made for a frustrating read.

YouTube channel Innuendo Studios has an excellent series of videos ("The Alt-Right Playbook") on this topic which I would highly recommend if you're interested. I can't say I recommend Neoreaction a Basilisk, unfortunately. 
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