Sucker by Daniel Hornsby

Published by Anchor on July 11, 2023

Sucker is marketed as a satire, but it takes the form of a thriller that morphs into a horror novel. I suspect the horror is meant to be satirical, because vampires are only taken seriously by Bram Stoker fans and romance novelists. Unfortunately, the horror comes too late to distinguish Sucker from non-satirical thrillers that follow the same formula.

Sucker tells a story of corporate greed driven by a “secret society” that is controlling the world (or, at least, pulling the strings that matter to its members). Its members have an ability they describe as “the Gift.” Perhaps it is the concept of a secret cabal (common in thriller literature and far-right blogs) that Daniel Hornsby meant to satirize. Or perhaps he meant to mock Elizabeth Holmes, who famously bilked investors with promises of technical advances in medicine that they probably should have recognized as unachievable. Regardless of Hornsby’s intent, Sucker hews too tightly to the conventions and content of a traditional thriller to satirize effectively.

The story is apparently set in an alternate universe where the tech industry is centered in San Narcisco and Facebook is called GetTogether. Perhaps the changes were intended to assure that Holmes wouldn’t sue Hornsby. At the heart of the story is a young man named Charlie. Charlie is not a virtuous thriller hero. He’s a bit of a slacker. He’s self-centered and often self-pitying. He’s nevertheless interesting because his faults give him enormous room for growth. The plot of Sucker creates an incentive for Charlie to become a better person. Circumstances also give him the opportunity to remain self-centered. What choice Charlie will make fuels the story’s minimal dramatic tension. Given the artificial nature of the choice, I’m not sure many readers will care what Charlie does.

Charlie calls himself Chuck Gross but he was born Charles Grossheart, the son of a wealthy businessman. His father made a fortune in the oil industry by being evil. He pays lobbyists to disparage global warming so that his fossil fuel investments are not threatened by trivial concerns like destroying the planet.

Charlie uses a different working name so that he will not be disparaged as a music producer. He started his own label devoted to the rebirth of punk rock, appropriately named Obnoxious. His “noisy vanity project” is bleeding money, but he hopes a newly released album called Sucker by Pro Laps will improve its revenues. It helps that Thane, the band’s lead male vocalist, made the news by dying under mysterious circumstances. His girlfriend, the band’s drummer, now sings Pro Laps songs with the kind of grief that punk fans regard as authentic. Thanks to Thane’s suspicious death, Obnoxious might make money after all.

Before Thane dies, Charlie worries about paying his artists without going to his family for help. He accepts an invitation from his college friend, Olivia Watts, to join her business as a creative consultant. Mostly Olivia wants to exploit Charlie’s family name to attract investors to her business. The company claims it is engineering biological nanobots that will monitor and eventually cure medical problems as they arise, dramatically extending lifespans. Olivia’s true goal is less humanitarian. Olivia is the Elizabeth Holmes character in that her promised technological advances are untethered to reality. Perhaps Holmes, like Olivia, had “the Gift” in the sense that she had an unusual talent for persuading investors to follow her. I’m not sure that appealing to greed actually requires any persuasive talent, but the Gift is a key element of Olivia’s success.

Charlie is eventually approached by a whistleblower who has evidence that Olivia’s company is scamming investors by making overblown claims of success in its research. Charlie doesn’t know whether to believe the whistleblower or his old friend Olivia, although he eventually recognizes obvious signs that Olivia is manipulating him. The novel finally shifts into second gear when the whistleblower arrives, but it travels a long road in first before it reaches that point.

To foreshadow the conspiracy plot, Charlie encounters a symbol — an infinity sign with teeth — at odd locations on Olivia’s company property. Why is the symbol carved into a table leg? Who knows. Eventually we learn about “an ancient society of the world’s most intelligent and talented individuals, all working to bring about the evolution of humanity to something better, stronger.” Secret societies are ubiquitous in thrillers. I wish they existed so they could do something useful, although in most thrillers they are only interested in advancing the interests of their members. A society doesn’t need to be secret to advance that goal. The Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, among many others, operate in the open to achieve their nefarious ends.

About two-thirds of the novel has passed before we learn the truth about Olivia. That truth made me wonder why I’d been reading about Charles’ obsession with his family and his little music company, none of which has much to do with the story’s eventual focus. I suppose the revelation is where the satire begins, the point at which a mundane story about a rebellious rich kid begins to emulate a thriller, complete with murders and chase scenes. Olivia acknowledges that her scheme will do something awful to test subjects, something that might appear “unsavory” to the uninitiated. I suppose that’s satire, as is Olivia’s notion of wealthy people who have “the Gift” leading a cultural and biological evolution. Perhaps the intent is to blend white supremacy with wealthy entitlement while poking fun at both of them, but the satire never grabbed me, never exposed anything that hasn’t always been obvious. Swindlers are bad? Global warming deniers are evil? Greed isn’t good? Oh really? A better title for a novel making those points without developing them into an exciting story would be Obvious Observations.

Some paragraphs of Sucker feel like padding. A diatribe about zebras and a description/discussion of various family portraits in the Grossheart mansion add little beyond word count to the story. Yes, the zebra eventually becomes a symbol of Charlie’s true essence, but only in Charlie’s deluded mind. Hornsby’s smooth prose kept me reading even as I continued to wonder how he planned to make an interesting story out of a secret society and punk rock and vampires. As satire, a vampire story doesn’t have the bite (no pun intended) of a proposal to eat children. Even with the addition of mysterious deaths and an Elizabeth Holmes clone, Hornsby never developed an engrossing story, whether it is classified as a thriller or a horror novel or a satire. I was ultimately disappointed that some decent writing and characterization failed to serve a stronger story.

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