Lockdown in Hell World

by Luke O'Neil

Foreshadowing a subsequent exodus, Luke O’Neil and his wife moved from the city to the suburbs just prior to the lockdown. Isolated not only by a virus but also by the alienation of a neighborhood where social distancing meant more than just geographical separation, O’Neil faced trials on numerous fronts: How to avoid potentially lethal clashes with new Republican neighbors? How to continue a working life as one America’s most electric, hard-hitting commentators without the opportunity of face-to-face reporting? How to maintain his own sanity, always a frail ship, while the world as we knew it disintegrated?

These pages chronicle that struggle. In turns furious, funny and philosophical they show a writer leavening his own feelings of helplessness by conversing with others experiencing the same discomfort – a postal worker, grocery store clerk, hotel receptionist, and people with kids stuck at home or Trump supporting family members. He talks, too, with a demonstrator whose eye was blinded by a police projectile on a Black Lives Matter protest.

Shifting back and forth across a summer lost to a virus and an economic system already deeply unjust and now profoundly dysfunctional, the sense of desperation that laces together O’Neil’s taut rendering serves, paradoxically, to reassure: In battling to overcome the particular obstacles they face in the pandemic, working class people are in this together.




"Luke O’Neil is like no other journalist working today, fusing original reporting with memoir and frequently-profane observational humor to create what feels like a new type of truth-telling: precise, fucked-up, infuriating, and, somehow, beautiful. ...This is what it looks like when a gifted writer finds his voice.” —Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack

Genres: Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[lukeoneil47 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn this is good as hell!

[j · Rating 5 out of 5]

The frayed edges of extremes get even more stretched in O'Neil's latest writings: the darkest and freakiest glimpses at the bizarro space we occupy currently, offset with some of his most gorgeous and soul-affirming writing yet. I keep coming back to one chapter in particular, "Even though we didn't live near the ocean anymore" -- such a stunning, heartfelt, hilarious and haunting piece.

[Mike Assatly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very real look at the world and all it’s failings while relating to it with personal experience, references and dry humor. A great reminder that we are all human and that no one should be suffering in such a world of excess

[leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading o'neil's unique take on our collective hellscape is sometimes cathartic, other times infuriating, and still others darkly comedic.

if we're going to have to live through this, it's good to know we won't be doing so alone.

[Rajeeve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book of the year. Seriously, years from now when my kid asks me what 2020 was like for adults, this is the first thing I’ll point him to.

[Jake Basner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could make everyone I know read this book, but since I know so many people who wouldn’t read a book for $1000 I’ll just constantly reference this book for the foreseeable future

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possible subtitle: The Sufferer and the Witness (there's a post-punk joke for you, Luke)

Really liked this one. Not a cheerful read, but I found it deeply validating and oddly comforting to see the despair and strangeness of the past year put into words. I'm glad we'll have essays like this to prove in years to come, that, yeah, 2020 really was that effed, to catalog a lot of little things about it that were effed and that we've already lost track of, and to remind us not to look away from it all. I think the reason his work speaks to me is because it's cynical, sardonic, incisive, and self-deprecating in a way that feels suited to this era (and to my filthy Masshole heart), but without any of the nihilism, posturing, or smugness that often comes with that. It's also unceasingly but unsentimentally empathetic; we need to care about and help other people, period, and that will never be up for debate.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

There will never be a "right" time to read a book like this and I'm not sure why it called out to me now, but I'm glad it did. At a time when so much commentary and reporting is mired in soulless centrism or literally spit out by a computer, you can feel Luke's blood coursing through the pages and it gives his writing a bracing, cathartic energy. A vital document of a dark time.

[Boreal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, heart-felt, brutally honest essays about the particular hellscape we find ourselves in during the pandemic and the election and the civil rights battle that is still unfolding. Always worth reading.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I forget exactly when and how I first discovered Luke O'Neil's work but it was somewhere around the beginning of the pandemic and probably via some combination or overlap of left Twitter, Defector, and various Substack newsletters. Wait now I remember - it was his "The Last Normal Day" series that one or another of the writers I follow on Twitter or elsewhere must have been featured on. From there I explored more of O'Neil's work and it kept popping up throughout the year and sure enough eventually I went "yeah this guy deserves my money in the form of a book purchase" and that is how I end up reading like eighty percent of the nonfiction I read these days. At any rate, Lockdown in Hell World is a spin-off of sorts, a COVID-19 pandemic addendum of sorts to the previous and twice-as-long Welcome to Hell World, which is presumably a mixed bag of essays and interviews just like this thing was, but which I have not yet read. I've enjoyed O'Neil's style and passion previous to diving in here - mad as hell, stream of consciousness flow, always handy with a deeply cutting line or observation - but I've got two main gripes with the book I just read. One is that it felt rushed, by which I mean it was both a teeny bit sloppy (underlined words in a paperback betraying their history as hyperlinks) and very premature. Which isn't to say that this is Andrew Cuomo releasing "How I beat COVID-19 in New York" in the summer of 2020 or anything, but rather that there's an awful lot of March-through-August of 2020 here and that the book already feels quaint and dated even though it shouldn't, as a collection of thoughts and fears and worries recorded and written at the front end of "this whole thing" if you will. Like I think he finished writing this at some point in November and, man, it was all just about to get both so much worse (spikes!) and so much better (vaccines!) and because of that - and maybe this is hindsight being 20/20 or whatever - this almost feels like it only covers the first of three "acts" if you will. And yes maybe I'm a goddamn fool for insinuating that we have reached the final act here in April 2021, even if only here in America, but yeah there's just this entire chunk of the pandemic "story" that feels like it's missing. In fairness this is maybe only supposed to cover the "lockdown" portion of the whole thing, which we were pretty collectively done with by June or whatever, but then if that's the case why does this overextend itself into police brutality protests and the beginning of the general election season? I digress. My other gripe is that 250 straight pages of doom and gloom is just an awful lot to swallow. A pessimistic essay can be a beautiful read; thirty straight can be a bit much! Especially when at least some of the pessimism and doom and gloom and fear feel unfounded just a few months later. Like all these interviews with people losing their minds about "pandemic deniers" congregating en masse at beaches, or restaurant workers worried that they'll catch covid from people drinking on outdoor patios. That said I know the point of something such as this isn't so much depicting accurate risk assessments as much as capturing the mindsets of the people who had to live through all this uncertainty, so maybe you can crumple up this whole gripe and whip it into the next waste bin you see.