Of the Top of My Head Review: The Turner Diaries

I read this in like middle school as a .txt file downloaded off a Hotline server. After the Oklahoma City bombing, Newsweek and some other magazines (the then-news authorities) had mentioned it as important and I took their word for it.

It was terrible.

And I’m not talking like morally, I’m not a ponce like that. And not even the wooden writing and characterization, though they were far below the standard for bottom-of-the-barrel published pulp or even Star Trek slash that it was contemporary with.

I’m talking like I cannot remember a single character (the protagonist was male, and there’s a girl) or more than 3 moments from this novel

At some point early on people are hiding their guns inside the walls of their houses because the federal government is sending around gangs of black gangbangers to confiscate them, that’s one

The second moment really gets to the problem with the book though. Because the second moment is the Day of the Rope and it makes clear the author had no clue what he was doing with this work

The Day of the Rope, when the good white Americans realize their power, rise up, and hang the internal traitors from lampposts, is clearly the emotional heart, the payoff of the whole work.

And it’s like 3 pages long, at most, set in California without any established characters while the main cast are in another state entirely.

And then it’s like he realizes that whoops, my plot arc never intersected with the climax, and the falling action is like “and yeah sure then he flies a nuclear bomb into the Pentagon”

(I did remember that the one example hung during DotR was a white woman who dated black guys. That sense of “white women betrayed us white men in favor of stylish minorities” was definitely a bigger thing than people care to remember last time around. The professional class version was the prosecutor and his wife in Bonfire of the Vanities, him seething at her fashionably concerned for the animals he has to repress in order to enable civilization.

That and the Al Bundy/Clark Griswold “I suffer and do my best to serve as patriarch but you don’t hold up your end and the culture takes your side you ingrates”)