Welcome to Hell by "Bad" Billy Pratt, 178 pages
Repeatedly, in the collection of blog posts that make up Welcome to Hell, author Billy Pratt earnestly declares the mission of the writer to be the arduous distillation of truth from experience. Given such a seemingly grandiose conception of his vocation, the reader might expect a diatribe against contemporary illusions and delusions. Whether attracted or repelled by that prospect, what he will find if he dares to open the book is a series of vignettes, some funny, some poignant, some simply depressing, most of them defying cheap moralizing and instead inviting understanding. What emerges is a portrait of Hell, a realm of aging adolescent consumers searching ever more desperately for validation or just the next dopamine fix, having already pawned their youth and healthy relationships.
An obvious trap for a collection of this kind is for the entries to become numbingly repetitive, but Pratt's descriptive approach avoids this entirely. At the same time, the strong thematic unity and the unmistakable voice of the author keeps it from feeling disjointed. The whole reads less like a haphazard bunch of essays than a carefully constructed novel in the tradition of Zola, albeit one holding up a mirror to a very different world.
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