A satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture, following a washed-up actor on his quest to revive the cult TV show that catapulted him to teenage fame.
A very serious story about the perniciousness of conspiracy thinking, wrapped in a very funny yarn about the shallowness of celebrity culture ... Reboot wrings brilliant laughs from the absurdity of David’s predicament, and the way Hollywood and internet language can seem like foreign tongues.
Reboot is an anxious book ... Taylor’s gently comic tone and kinetic prose make this hard-going travel easier, as do his many clever reinventions ... A performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused ... The book seems caught between an honest reckoning with dread and an impulse to reassure. There will be blood, but it’s not as devastating as it deserves to be.
A pretext for Mr. Taylor’s ruminations on streaming television, celebrity brand management, social-media memes and the fever swamps of online conspiracy-theory forums ... The meditations are undoubtedly intelligent, but they require a wide range of cultural knowledge ... To really enjoy Reboot you need to delight in finding and identifying these textual "Easter eggs," as David likes to refer to them, because the story itself is static and half-hearted.
