Pornoland Review

Philosophy, Theology, Pornography

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

For those old enough to remember, the tag line in the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects was “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” I think about that line a lot when I’m contemplating the ever-expanding societal disaster that is modern pornography. Dopamine addiction, gooncaves, teenagers using Viagra - I’m not going to talk about that, because others have already done so, with more depth and eloquence than I can. I write today to review the newly-released debut novel Pornoland, by Tyson James aka Krug.

The title is, in some ways, misleading. Yes, Pornoland is about the making of a pornagraphic film, but it is neither explicit nor salacious. It would meet no one’s definition of pornography. And neither is it a simple cautionary tale about the dangers of porn - a naive young girl seduced into a life of degradation or a young man wanking his life away, like a CBS After School Special for the 2020s. Rather, it is an exploration of the spiritual horror that lies at the end of the road that lack of belief puts a human being on. There are many ways to reach that dark place, and this novel describes only one of them.

The narrator and main character is Brock Solitt, a scriptwriter and marketing executive for a porn production company hilariously named StudioFuck. He is a failed PhD student who found himself in the porn industry to make money. He is also incapable of sex, due to a childhood accident, although otherwise normal. As an asexual intellectual, Brock would seem to be immune from the corruption and depravity inherent to those involved in the porn industry, or so he believes as the book begins. Pornoland opens with a quote from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and, in my mind, is shot through with Lewis’s theology. At its core, it is about Brock’s descent into darkness.

The book, as I said before, is about the making of a pornographic film. The production company for which Brock works belongs to a conglomerate owned by porn mogul Dexter Sabbat. Sabbat has a Bond villain level of wealth - multiple palaces, private jets, megayachts - and wants StudioFuck to film a screen adaptation of an obscure erotic novel called Occulus. He intends this movie to be the vehicle which breaks pornography into the mainstream, fusing it with the culture of Internet celebrity and making it a part of everyday life. To this end, he hires an Academy Award winning director, devotes a seemingly infinite supply of money to the project, and turns StudioFuck loose.

I don’t wish to spoil the novel, so I won’t go any further into the specifics of the plot. All I will say is that the production takes the cast and crew to Rome, Venice, North Africa, and Spain; and along the way, they spiral down into ever greater depths of depravity and degradation. Brock, by way of his peculiar condition, is seemingly spared from this, but his very intellectualism leaves him open to a much subtler but ultimately more terrifying seduction by the increasingly malevolent Sabbat. No more details, but the atmosphere of burgeoning evil in the book took hold of me in the first chapter and never let go.

Before I close, I do want to highlight James’s skill with language. He does an amazing job of painting pictures of the settings: decaying buildings, polluted canals, and secretive bars in Venice; the stark, arid beauty of the North African desert; Sabbat’s gargantuan megayacht. Sentences and scenes are beautifully crafted. By way of example, I present the following description of a new addiction to the film crew:

“There is a word to describe such a woman, a perfect composite, one of those rare linguistic units whose sound, sense and etymology all perfectly coalesce into a flawless harmony of meaning, and it is a shame, I should add, that such a term has fallen out of use, that it has become something of an epithet even, for it is one of my favorite descriptors: our newest member was a bull dyke.”

If that’s not the most wonderfully worded treatise on a sexual minority you ever heard, I don’t know what to tell you.

As I mentioned before, I see C.S. Lewis’s theology everywhere in this book, and the closest I will come to a spoiler is to say that Pornoland ends where Mere Christianity begins. So go read it. It is that rarest of literary birds: a work of great intellectual weight, dealing with issues of deadly seriousness, which also manages to be an engaging and enthralling read.

Purchase a copy of Pornoland here