Ultimart

There was a time in my life that I would sit down and read some Dystopian Fiction and not consider at all that it would happen in my lifetime, but all I need to do is some doomscrolling on my social medias to think that elements of Carl Wilhoyte’s Ultimart may not be long in our future. This is a book that takes the dark sensibilities of a Chuck Palahniuk Transgressional Fiction novel, adds in some Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and then, for good measure, plops into a couple of dollops of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. What could possibly go wrong with that mix? What has a chance to even go right? 

Corwin Scaggs has a middling office job in a company that takes AI images and fixes them for the advertising industry. An extra finger removed here, a gurning mouth erased there. Corwin starts to question the point of why he is even bothering. He lives on the edge of bankruptcy inside a giant dome alongside 20 million other people also on the edge of destitution. In this society having no money means a probable death and having your children sold off. Corwin discovers that there may be a way to undermine the system, but at what cost? 

Dystopian is a dark genre, but Ultimart may be one of the darkest books that I have read, not just because the future is bleak, but because Wilhoyte tackles it with a dark sense of humour, and that you can feel elements of it happening already. This is a poisoned Earth where people have been forced to live in domes under the yoke of commercial powers and ultimately a dispassionate AI. For all his life Corwin has worked diligently in the system, but even so, his future and that of his family, is looking bleak. 

Matters come to a head when Corwin takes his father home to care for him. Without the money to keep his father alive, Corwin starts to find faults in the Dome’s core systems to exploit. This leads to an awakening and a new purpose in life. The book is the Fall and Rise of Corwin, but in this future, can anyone truly win? 

Ultimart truly felt like a mix of Palahniuk, Gilliam, and Judge, and that is no bad thing. These are three touchstones I have enjoyed for years. The world of Ultimart is on the point of being fully broken, like in Idiocracy, but rather than the people being stupid, they are numb and controlled in a bureaucratic nightmare. Then you then have the layer of Transgressive Fiction, Corwin as the Tyler Durden looking to undermine the system they find themselves in. 

Anyone who is a fan of any of these three properties will get a lot from Ultimart, but it is hard going. Fight Club was no walk in the park; Brazil has no happy ever after. Ultimart follows in this trend. There are poignant moments peppered throughout the book, small stories of a child’s death, or a father sold into slavery. What makes these takes even bleaker is that they are not the focus of the story, but mere asides, as if they are regular occurrences in this cold future. 

Is Ultimart a funny book? Not in a laugh out loud way, but there is a dark surrealism that will appeal to those with a pitch-black sense of humour. It is more an interesting Science Fiction novel that uses the genre as it should – the future explores the present. Are we heading to a version of Ultimart, or at least adopting some of it? I fear that we are and Wilhoyte uses this story to an impactful effect.