I’M STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BLACK BOX OF DOOM is a road-trip book with three primary characters. The first is a disaffected long-suffering alienated affluenza victim, scraping by his existence as a part-time Uber driver and a full-time “streamer.” This means that he sits on his rear end, plays video games and sends out livestreams of him playing these games to a tribe of other affluenza victims with literally nothing else to do in this life. The second is an opinionated ratchet-mouthed manic former TikTok “influencer” who would be the very last person one would take on a cross-country road trip, or a 20-minute drive to the laundromat, or a date. The third is a large black box that I quite liked. It didn’t say anything.

"When Pargin is not scolding us about social media, he is being low-key hilarious. This shows up both in the off-the-wall interpretations of the internet wacko crowd about what’s really going on, and the myriad twists and turns of the story itself."

Jason Pargin is trying to do two things, one of which is noble. He would like to tell a suspenseful, entertaining, nerve-wracking story about a mysterious black box that could contain anything --- anything! --- and its journey towards a portentous event where a domestic terror plot may or may not be taking shape. He also is attempting to spray out thousands upon thousands of words about how social media (which, after all, is people talking to people, and the only thing wrong with that is how crazy the people are) is bad and that it ruins people’s lives on a daily basis.

Nobody wants to listen to pages and pages of that, especially as it’s blurted out through the mouths of two annoying and tendentious characters. Yes, social media is bad for you. So are cigarettes, Taco Bell and all sorts of other things, like badly written and overwrought book reviews. Stipulated.

The characters have to get from Los Angeles to Washington, and there are hundreds of miles of Arizona, Texas and Tennessee to get through. Of course you’re going to have long conversations, or else it’s just dead air, which nobody wants. Pargin ensures that there isn’t dead air. He accomplishes this because the road trip ends up being all but subsumed in the meta-story of the people following the road trip. Sports fans are familiar with this. You had the whole kerfuffle last winter about the airplane leaving Los Angeles for Toronto, the one that maybe had Shohei Ohtani in it, on his way to sign a massive contract with the Blue Jays. That did not happen, much to the consternation of the people who assured us that it was happening.

Pargin takes this concept and blows it up to scale. The tiny fan base for the YouTube streamer interacts with the greater Reddit conspiracy-theory troll community, which draws in a semi-retired FBI agent, a relentless biker with a curious tattoo, and the streamer’s father, who is what Cameron’s father in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off must have been like. When Pargin is not scolding us about social media, he is being low-key hilarious. This shows up both in the off-the-wall interpretations of the internet wacko crowd about what’s really going on, and the myriad twists and turns of the story itself.

I mentioned the three primary characters without pointing out what is really the fourth: the pristine, eggshell-white Lincoln Navigator that is the focus of the manic search for the silent, menacing, possibly deadly black box of doom. The Navigator didn’t ask to be taken on a road trip, or have its immaculate exterior scratched, its front end wrecked, or any of the other things that happen to it along the way. It is the only truly innocent character in the novel, and bad things happen to it. I identified with it like you would not believe.