Rarely does a debut make the bestseller lists; but Philipp Winkler’s novel “Hool”, published in 2016, was also not your usual debut novel, not a sharp-edged account of the crises of middle-class youth. Instead, Winkler told of a football fan whose purpose in life is to beat up supporters of the rival team.
The author, who was born in Neustadt am Rübenberge in Lower Saxony in 1986, punched life into fiction in a fast-moving and cinematic manner.
Accordingly, the expectations of his second novel “Creep” are high. Alternating chapter by chapter, Winkler tells the story of two characters who get lost in the dirty corners of the internet. One is thirty-year-old Fanni, a click worker for a company that operates security cameras in private homes.
She would prefer never to leave her office cubicle, since she can spy on the lives of customers here. Fanni is a stalker. What she likes best is watching the Naumanns, a loving nuclear family with whose daughter Fanni identifies. She hasn’t had any contact with her parents for a long time, as she avoids personal contacts anyway.
Junya behaves like a hikikomori
Estranged even from her body, Fanny calls it “Meat Prison” and envisions a future where she can upload her consciousness to a cloud.
The second main character, the Japanese Junya, has also closed himself off. Almost twenty years ago he dropped out of school due to harsh bullying. Since then, he has had his mother put his meals outside the door of his children’s room.
A behavior that has also spread beyond Japan under the name Hikikomori. Except Junya is a special case. Because he does leave his room, but only at night. He belongs to a subculture that celebrates online breaking into homes and beating on the sleeping residents.
They make videos of their exploits and brag about it to each other. Junya’s victims are teachers, he wants revenge for his traumatic school days. The media soon became aware of him. Based on a horror film, they call it Tama’s Nightmare.
He enjoys celebrity and sees his clips as works of art. But then his mother dies and he has to find his way around the dreaded outside world. Fanni is also in trouble. She sells addresses from her company’s customer database on the dark web to one of Junya’s fellow thugs, of all people.
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Only she can stop the serial killer who beats up sleepers in her town night after night, provided she gets out of her comfort zone.
The idea is promising, “Creep” could have been a respectable thriller. Only the static system slows down the tension. As the story progresses, the plot approaches the rules of a young adult book, but with protagonists that are much too old for this.
Junya unexpectedly meets his worst tormentor from school, who now leads a gang of burglars. Plagued by a bad conscience, the criminal takes Junya into his gang, treats him to his fear of the outside world and gently straightens his head: “This isn’t some gangster movie or anything.”
Pity! Because a little more determination and courage to the genre would have done the novel good. And for a subtle analysis of the digital world, Winkler is stylistically too modest. The text seems quickly written and the plot doesn’t have enough twists and turns.
For them, the Internet is a place of avoidance
The only thing that is linguistically striking is the amount of anglicisms (“credentials”, “video annotation tool”, “skimming”), which, however, far from their origin – IT industry, blogs, Reddit forums – are just buzzwords. They serve at most to prove that Winkler has researched. They don’t produce a coherent nerd sound.
“Creep” may pass as a digital social drama, as a portrait of a milieu that flees from the demands of reality into passivity. For Fanni and Junya, the Internet is not a place for communication, but rather for avoiding it. Ultimately, they long for recognition and security.
But there is no compassion. Winkler also doesn’t make it easy for his characters to appear sympathetic, when he has them smash in their skulls or spy on children right from the start. Heiko Kolbe, the main character of his debut, was not popular either. You could take him for a hooligan asshole and still root for him.
Junya and Fanni don’t reach that level of plasticity. Her detachment from the world expresses itself only in renewed distance. They appear pale and invented, as if they could not get beyond the virtual state.
