Eat The Rich by Andrew Rivas
Stay Hungry…
In February of 2022, Ash Whatever uploads the first video in her Eat the Rich series on YouTube—a cooking tutorial featuring tacos de lengua made from the tongue of morally corrupt televangelist David White. Over the next six months, the menu grows with more videos and more victims, kick-starting a revolution that gives a voice to the working class.
But how far is too far? Does the end always justify the means?
Chronicled through social media posts, chat logs, and comment chains, metaphor becomes reality and the amoral rich become accountable for their actions as the internet community takes sides. Is Ash a revolutionary or a cold-blooded killer?
Decide for yourself. But whatever you do, stay hungry
Eat The Rich by Andrew Rivas is Hannibal Lecter meets the Internet. The story itself is told through various forms of social media (transcriptions of YouTube videos, Reddit, Twitter feeds, etc) rather than straight prose to weave a clever and thought-provoking story.
Vigilante Ash Whatever releases a series of YouTube videos in which she claims to be killing, cooking, and eating millionaires and billionaires as her own form of social justice. Once the first video is uploaded, you see the various reactions from all over the internet, and as time goes on, you watch the movement take on a life of it’s own.
The story is very modern, and uses a mix of suspense, thriller, and satire, to address social and political issues in a very creative way. It can’t be easy to tell a story entirely through comments on social media platforms, but somehow Andrew Rivas pulled it off.
The downside to this type of format, and therefore, the book itself, is that like the Internet, everything is pretty anonymous, so there are no specific characters for the reader to attach to. Everything is small glimpses into a lot people, but it is all so fast that you never really get to meet them. In this way, it left me feeling like I wanted a little bit more.
All that aside, Eat The Rich is an unusual style that had me hooked from the first page. This is not a character driven novel, it is a series of events and the reactions, responses, and fallouts from those events.
Eat The Rich does contain a few swear words and a little bit of violence (though very little actual gore), so if that doesn’t bother you, this is definitely an interesting book to check out.
Have you read any books that feature a heavy amount of social media?
Bookish Yarn 