☆☆☆☆☆
(0 stars)
I picked this up knowing what it was. I’m a bad book aficionado, I wanted to own this rather infamous novel. I’m not going to delve into the author too much yet, but I’ll cover two important facts: he is horrible, and this was a pre-owned copy.
A lot about Onision can be learned just from Reaper’s Creek itself- it’s one of the most telling books I’ve ever read about his childhood and internal thought processes. Before the book begins, there is actually a note that welcomes my insight: Onision states “All of my books […] are not creations of pure fiction, these are stories from my own life mixed in with my imagination” And “[This book] is simply myself, who I was both good and bad, during the time this takes place.” So, the author pretty openly welcomes me to look at the events of this bonkers story and try to puzzle out what are his memories and what are his fantasies. It’s very easy, and increasingly disturbing. This book contains content which I have to comment on, but which is going to be a big uncomfortable, regarding sexuality and underage happenings. Take heed.
Plot
I wanted to go up the trail to swing alone, but I felt a familiar wet dew on my feet, of course, I wasn’t wearing any socks or shoes yet.
Daniel is 11 years old and lives with his stepfather and mother. His father is semi-estranged and very religious, and despite being an accused sexual predator towards young girls, seems to have shared custody over Daniel and his two sisters. Daniel is a completely average kid, despite describing himself as having chiselled good looks and being, somehow, 5’10”. The start of Reaper’s Creek is incredibly mundane, and immediately feels a series of stories and half memories. In some ways it was a convincingly written book, because I entirely believed almost everything that happened up to the halfway point was based on real events. Everything is rather vague besides random details and sudden ‘set pieces’- such as an early part about Daniel swinging very fast on the swing and then jumping super far. It’s entirely irrelevant to everything but has so much focus it is obviously based on the author’s memory of doing this. It’s the same for a lot of the interchangeable childhood things- his best friend spitting on his hand before doing high fives, his uncle pressuring him to drink alcohol, the creek in his backyard full of dead fish he shoots arrows into, him often imagining immense violence like the school bus exploding for fun.
The bus pulled up and took us to school, just like I remembered the smell was the same, the stops were pretty much the same & the school itself looked the same.
It’s very likely a lot of this book is based on the author’s actual childhood, which adds a sad and creepy factor to a lot of it. Especially as the first while into the book nothing really happens besides these mumbled, boring anecdotes from being in elementary school that serve no purpose. The actual story crops in a little in the form of an alien Daniel sees in his dreams every night, experimenting on him- another detail I believe is lifted from real life.
Eventually, Daniel gains from the alien the ability to sense and see death. They’re like quest markers in a video game that he has to ‘clear out’ around his house before he can catch any sleep- he sees these bright red glows that fade once he’s looked at the sources. Daniel is rather upset by this power, and the alien- who he realizes is actually the ‘special ed kid’ in his school. It’s very tasteless of course- he realizes the kid has a tic which is like what the alien does. Daniel accidentally melts his mother’s eyes in rage and then accidentally regrows them, after which she is oddly calm and happy.
The alien lets him know that it can only reach him when he’s not under a metal roof, so Daniel wraps himself in tinfoil and has a fine sleep- until different aliens show up, tear off his roof, and experiment on him. In response, the kid alien attacks Daniel in the bathroom and fixes what the other aliens did to him. The alien part of this is never suitably explained and confusing, so just try to roll with it.
Here’s a big troubling section, and a return to the mundane- kind of. A year has passed, though Daniel is somehow still 11, and he’s visiting his father again in Ohio when he meets Julia. It’s unclear if he actually met her last year since the start of the book mentions him having a crush on a girl who looks just like her, just as it’s unclear why Julia’s nickname is ‘Julie’. Julia is 15. Daniel has a huge crush on Julia, and she rather weirdly reciprocates, leading to sex. I don’t have to cover the age gap thing being super gross, right? It does give me a very funny paragraph though.
The fabric of the couch had a purple base color, and a design paying tribute to the natives of America.
Mid (very short and non explicit) sex scene
I sort of believe there was a Julia in the author’s life. Hopefully not one he actually had sex with when he was 11, but a teen he had a thing for when he was on vacation. I’ll cover the wish fulfilment stuff more in depth later, but obviously this book stands as a series of fantasies based around memories.
On the plane ride home, Daniel runs into the kid alien and kills him with a fork to the neck, then is picked up by the second group of aliens who thank him for doing so. However, Daniel is fed up with being abducted and starts screaming them to death. He quickly realizes he can simply kill them with his brain. However, he grows bored immediately with psychic alien murder, and just implodes their spaceship and flies back down to his body.
Here’s a timeskip, where Daniel is now 14. His psychic powers have grown massively and he uses them to influence everything and one in his life to be an ideal: Julia calls him when he misses her, and ignores him when he doesn’t feel like talking. His best friend now is great and in all his classes. He passes all his classes, and whatever he wants simply happens. There are no obstacles or challenges to Daniel: in fact, when he realizes one of his classmates is an alien in human form, he kills him instantly, flies to the ship he came from, realizes it’s a trap but is entirely immortal and unaffected as he kills the aliens who set the trap. Then he returns to his body in seconds.
Daniel realizes he can control the world, even the universe, and also suddenly grows tired of the fakeness he’s made for himself, so he dispels the mind control he had over people. His best friend remarks he dislikes Daniel and hasn’t liked him since elementary school, and his smiley mother is actually rather disturbed still about the whole exploding eyes incident. There is a certain, maybe interesting, element of unconscious mind control Daniel has been doing since he was 11. His mother was suddenly fine after the eyeball exploding incident, for example, because Daniel had unwittingly controlled her mind to smile and be happy. The natural reading with Julia is that he was attracted to her and without being aware made her interested in him- there’s even a moment back when he’s 11 where Daniel thinks ‘he missed his chance’ with Julia, and as he’s cursing himself for that, Julia suddenly is into him. However, sadly and stupidly, Julia just genuinely loves him and is unaffected by him releasing the mind control.
David was smiling across the room from me, two pretty teachers with cleavage showing stood by waiting for me to address them at the entrance of the room.
I looked at all of them, and I smiled. “Something is about to change” I said. The teacher with larger breasts than most anyone I’ve seen replied “What do you mean cutie?” and click … just like that, their smiles faded. Both teachers were overcome with an expression of confusion and immediately left the room.
David stood up, looked me in the eyes, lifted his finger and said “I don’t know what’s going on, but I haven’t liked you since elementary school. Stay away from me.” He then proceeded to leaving the room.
(If you’re curious, this book has no page numbers to cite)
Daniel leaves his home to be with Julia, however she is shot and killed by an assassin in a red and black polka dot suit. Daniel kills him, then departs to go kill every other alien in disguise on earth in a few seconds. He does it personally because he’s just so rage filled.
There were children in the bodies of children, their adopted mothers screamed at the loss of them, some of them had fathers who cried, some of them had no fathers at all.
Daniel then revives Julia and gives her a special stone- like the one he has in his head- which will make her immortal and all powerful like him. He decides he should edit the world to ‘fix’ it using a very simplistic mindset of how that would go down. His first thought is basically to eliminate ‘darkness’ in the world and make a place where everyone is just happy. Julia at least points out this is basically a lobotomy of the world’s population- indeed, forcibly and physically altering how everyone thinks to meet vague criteria. It’s odd Daniel doesn’t realize his decision to edit the world is exactly what he’d already been doing at his high school before he left.
What are Daniel’s eventual patch notes?
I strengthened potential victims of crimes. I designed defence mechanism, enhanced aspects of the human body to strike back in a natural yet bold manner.
Fingernails became as strong as steel, there no longer an imbalance between the genders, children were given the natural inclination to know the locations of their parents and their parents had the same connection to their children, so they could never be lost or abducted effectively.
I treated the world like lines of code in a video game, changing hit points, stamina, strength, I redesigned our species.
Thanks! These are incredibly stupid. Since when has ‘brittle fingernails’ been the downfall of humanity?
Daniel and Julia go to visit her father. I’m sorry there’s so many quotes now, but this is the time of the book where there’s so much ludicrous nonsense I feel like I have to share.
He spouted out “So women have teeth on their crotches now aye Daniel?” In the middle of my lemonade I tried to swallow without a hiccup. “Yes, I thought it would make sense.” Her dad look concerned, “What do you mean?” I replied sincerely “I mean, men have their swords, women should have their blades too right?”
Obviously, I’m preserving errors and formatting
Daniel realizes Julia’s father, like his own, is a child predator and immediately kills him. Julia understands but is distraught, so Daniel drops a lovely black coffin in the middle of their living room with his mind and fills it full of money. Then he flies away.
Daniel returns to his childhood home and the old creek, which he finds is full of dead women. He realizes they’ve all been killed by a guy named Gary. As he flies off to go murder Gary, he suddenly and without control changes appearances into like, He-man, which he will look like for the rest of the book. It’s not explained and might be the weirdest thing that happens.
As the water shot off in all directions my hair extended outward doubling in length. My hair turned from brown to golden blonde and my skin heated till the water steamed off it, leaving me dry, still holding a piece of a woman’s leg in my hand. My hair was so bright now and flowed to my shoulders, by why?
[…]
My soul shot out of my body without hesitation and I was immediately able to see a man with blue eyes, broad shoulders, at lease six feet tall standing there, he looked like he was in his late 20’s, almost double my age.
What I can only think of is that Daniel is powered by his mind and his wants within it, so him going to get justice on this serial killer is such a ‘heroic’ act to him he unconsciously transforms into a ‘hero’ body.
Anyways, more fast murdering as Daniel clears out Gary and all his friends, except the man who was forced to help Gary- who gets to die peacefully, with the lovely tasteless note that he was obese but “As his body slumped forward, a much thinner man stood up and walked out of him. Joseph was whole again.”
Daniel is suddenly attacked by the grim reaper, a creation of god. He turns the grim reaper into a marble and decides to kill God. He finds God is the son of a more powerful god named Kull. To help him kill God, Daniel creates The Body, a second version of himself. He flies into space and fights God (it’s phenomenally boring), and also learns God had a sister who he assaulted and killed out of jealousy, and that sister was the original creator of the Earth.
Daniel confronts Kull about God, and though Kull is now weak and sad about his horrible son God, Daniel is all powerful and just totally eliminates God and revives God’s unnamed sister. Universe solved. God’s sister takes control of Earth again, tells Daniel to stop editing it, and tells him the homeworld of the aliens who harassed him as a kid. He learns from the aliens that God told them to try and kill Daniel because God was afraid of him. Daniel also learns his real mother is actually God’s sister.
Years in the future, everything is perfect. God’s sister rewrote all of Earth and humanity so now there’s peace and happiness everywhere. Daniel ends by talking about how perfect his mother is and how happy he is.
I searched code of prisons, military bases even cancer hospitals and they were all gone. Kull’s daughter had done what I was afraid to do. She didn’t acknowledged opinions or cultures, and simply rebuilt the world in the way she deemed fit.
Just like the new god of earth instructed me, I didn’t physically alter the code of her planet or the people on it whatsoever. But I didn’t need to, as my original mother was perfect, and no matter how much I evolved, she would still be wiser than me.
The last paragraph
The author is a bad person who thinks he isn’t
Hard to name headings, innit.
Onision is… well. A groomer. A wetlands destroyed. A predator. A creep. A seriously-he-destroyed-some-wetlands-like-what. Also more allegedly a lot of other things. He’s a once famous youtuber from the cursed lands of the 00’s. He has some weird race things in his books, he has fatphobia and a hatred for religion and vegetarians. He thinks about mass death, murders, and shootings way too much and writes women in a way one could describe as ‘bad’.
However, he doesn’t think of himself as any of these things. I guess few people do. One noteworthy thing is how this book very much has the worst forced feminism you can think of. He very clearly doesn’t understand the idea of feminism and women’s rights, I guess. I know you might be thinking over the summary trying to pick out where in this book there’s anything that remotely is meant to be feminist, but that’s because he’s an idiot who can’t write.
There’s an insane amount of sexual assault and predatory behaviour in this very short book. It was a clean and breezy 2 hour read for me, less than some movies. In that time, we have Daniel’s pedo father, Julia’s pedo father, and Gary the serial killer of 14 women. All of these people are punished, the later two by a violent, personal death. To Daniel/the author, it is a powerful move for him to write disgusting men and then have them pay for the crimes he wrote. He further is trying to seem like a hero when his few changes to humanity include ‘vagina teeth for women’, ‘defence equality between genders’, and ’empowering would be victims of crime’. All of this adds up to a worldview I think quite clearly reflected, where Onision feels he is a protector of women, when really it shows a laughable understanding of the topic.
Obviously, it links too to his hero complex. Oh My, this whole book is a hero complex. It’s mentioned in text more than once, but that’s no excuse. Because of the Psychology Of Onision that you quickly can pick up by reading/watching about the guy, it’s pretty obvious the ideas in this book are his actual fantasies and ideas, not pure fiction. He is Daniel, and the start of the book even admits that (in the first chapter, the main character is even once mistakenly called ‘Greg’, Onision’s real name). Onision wants a world without mental illness, cancer hospitals, and war, and his dream of fixing it is simply to delete it. It’s a very naïve world view, I think. Suitably childish considering Daniel is basically stuck at being 11. Still, I don’t actually think this aspect is intentional.
To edit all of humanity at once, ignorant of culture or wishes, is to remove free will. And also, humanity. If everyone remembers what happened, you aren’t effectively doing as much- and they will likely feel some horror at the terror of mass editing. If they don’t know what happened, they are all different people now. You have created not-humans, who cannot react in the same ways, whose brains function differently and who are incapable of natural feelings and expressions in your pursuit of a perfect world. A utopia cannot be a place where everyone is simply the same, but that is what the end of the book suggests.
The author has issues
There’s another thing about both dads, and all grown men, in this book being criminals: it’s because of the author’s own issues. I know but won’t be reading his other books, but it’s a theme. Onision has daddy issues, and mommy issues. He has issue issues. Daniel’s stepfather seems super nice at first, but in the time skip we learn he drank, used drugs, and beat Daniel’s mother. His mother is praised by Daniel at first, but repeatedly fights with him, and threatens later to beat him with a belt which he responds to as if it’s typical. Of course, both his biological father and Julia’s bio dad are child predators. It’s only when Daniel learns his mother is actually God’s sister that he feels some deep peace and love, and ends the book praising her.
Another set of Issues: the violence and killing is absurd. It’s not like it’s gory, but it’s ludicrous how much there is. Daniel flies about murdering everyone on a spaceship, or a portion of the earth’s population- and he feels the need to do it in person too. He relishes in murder to this uncomfortable degree, especially the most brutal murder in the book of Gary the serial killer. All of it is brushed aside very much as meaningless and necessary, even when he’s personally slaughtering alien children in front of their mothers. Early in the book, there’s a fakeout where Daniel shows a scene of the school bus exploding, killing everyone inside and piercing his friend and cousin with shrapnel, only to say he was only imagining that because it’s fun. That’s bad, actually.
I don’t really want to say much about Julia, because, well- we get the Julia thing, right? How 11 year olds are children, and the idea of there being this mutual, romantic and sexual connection between one and a 15 year old is insane and gross? There is only one reference to it being weird, and it’s Daniel saying their relationship wouldn’t be approved by parents because of the age gap, but otherwise it’s portrayed as this ideal relationship with a genuine love at its heart. And no, it’s not better when she’s 18 and he’s 14, but at least then they could’ve been in the same high school together.
The wish fulfilment aspect
This book is wish fulfilment, and I can’t tell if it knows it is. On one hand, Daniel literally has his wishes granted with his mind subconsciously before he can control it. On the other, I don’t trust the author to be at all self-aware. This is the fantasy of a kid and a grown adult to be all powerful, have everyone fear/love him, to have a perfect girl, to succeed at everything, to rewrite the flaws he sees in humanity, and to kill all whom he hates effortlessly. It’s a bit uncomfortable because of that, because it feels like a masturbatory exercise in self worship.
It’s also very boring. I mean, yes, the book picks up once all this nonsense kicks together, and it’s a pretty breezy read despite the overall poor writing. However, there is no ‘plot’ to this book overall, and obviously there are no stakes when the main character is immortal and all powerful. He whisks around space killing the three parts of God, and winds up so powerful he can just revive another god, or make a giant clone version of himself with the same god-stone he has in his head. You want to read to see what awkward dialogue is coming next and what harebrained commentary Onision will try and make, but the actual meat and action is very dull.
There’s actually something slightly interesting to Daniel’s revelation he has brainwashed his community to suit his wishes- but even this is ruined because rather than be a moment of introspection, it’s just something Daniel has always known and simply decided now to cease. And Julia still loves him. So there’s nothing clever or thoughtful about any of this, it’s just a show of Daniel’s perfect life before he matures and ascends to godhood.
Overall
I’ve read worse books than this, but this is an overall unique book. I’m excited to add it to my collection of bad books. I want a sort of cabinet display of rare bad books to show off to visitors. “Would you like some wine? And can I interest you in an Ebony Flames?”
If you want to read it, it’s probably a pretty good bad book rec. It’s ridiculous, but also quite short, and while the writing often rambles and has plenty of errors, it’s understandable enough it won’t give you a headache. The plot is super funny, and there’s a lot you can quote to your friends and laugh over. Just never buy it new- find second hand or pirated copies. He’s quite the actual criminal.
Crow Defeats Books 