The Nihilisticats was the winner in the POP CULTURE category of the 2024 IndieReader Discovery Awards, where undiscovered talent meets people with the power to make a difference.
Following find an interview with author Matt Ingwalson.
What’s the name of the book and when was it published?
I published The Nihilisticats on February 1, 2024. It’s only available in print, mostly because I don’t want some AI to ingest it.
What’s the book’s first line?
“The first astronaut woke from his dream of stars and turned to marvel at the wonders of peoples past, to imagine vikings and pioneers, tiny dots tracing their way across a twisting planet.”
There are some lists and warnings that fill the book’s introductory pages, but that’s the first proper sentence.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch.”
The Nihilisticats is like The Crying of Lot 49 with deep fakes. Or Mr. Robot with a sense of humor. It’s about Americans searching for answers in a world where identity and truth have been obliterated by cyberscams, terrorism and conspiracies so vast they aren’t really conspiracies anymore. They’re just the way the world works.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
This book was an exercise in assembling ideas: A big cast of offbeat characters. Transcripts from various podcasts. Excerpts from a vaguely offensive self-help book. A wild rumor about the geography of America. The inherent unreliability of everything you see on a screen… I took everything I imagined, arranged it on top of a loose narrative, and trusted it would make sense. Which it does, to the extent modernity makes sense at all.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who would you say the character reminds you of?
Marc “Can” Antile is a classic noir protagonist, a laidback hair stylist sucked into a dangerous conspiracy by a femme fatale. His counterpoint in the book is Eyerus Heinrichson, a successful doctor consumed by doubts about modern masculinity. There’s a bit of Oedipa Maas (The Crying of Lot 49) in Can. There’s a bit of Quentin Compson (The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!) in Eyerus. But I think they’re both fairly original creations.
But not as original as my federal agent who’s convinced he’s an adjective. That character has no literary precedent. He was inspired by an abstract painting.
What’s the main reason someone should read this book?
We’re living in absurd times and The Nihilisticats revels in them. Most readers think it’s a comedy and maybe it is. But I think it gets to something very true about what it means to be an American in 2024.
What’s the best part of being an indie?
I’m so impatient. The query for my first full-length novel attracted interest from a few agents. But they all told me they’d need months to assess my full manuscript, and that even if they did take it on, it would take more months to find a publisher, and then it’d be a year before my book hit shelves. I was like, “Are you kidding? I could be dead by then.”
Point being, the best part about self-publishing is that I can share my books on my schedule, in the format I choose, when I believe they’re ready.
I also love art directing my covers. For The Nihilisticats, I wanted to design something that was simple enough to be a tattoo, something that felt subversive and DIY. To me, design feels like part of the creative journey in a way that submitting query emails does not.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
Sure, I suppose there is a magic combination of money, attention and shared creative vision that would attract me to a publisher.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
It’s the books themselves. If I write a book, I feel I have an obligation to that book to publish it. I mean, how rude would it be for me to just keep it in a drawer somewhere?
Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire? What book?
So many. Katherine Dunn. Charles Portis. Thomas Pynchon, of course. Leonard Michaels is kind of a deep cut. My most recent obsession is Martin Amis’s novel Night Train, which takes the form of a police procedural but ends in a nihilistic black hole that has left me emotionally paralyzed for life. Go read it, but make sure you have a bottle nearby when you finish.