Book Review : M.S. Coe - New Veronia (2019)
Long-time readers of this site know my abhorrence for children and teenager protagonists. Too often, they sound nothing like actual kids and storytellers turn them into vessels for conventional wisdom and other moral platitudes. It’s almost never done right. A interesting novel featuring kids that sound like kids is quite the challenge because they’re not interesting people in and of themselves. That didn’t stop debut novelist M.S. Coe from trying and (kind of) succeeding in the upcoming New Veronia, a terror-fueled fantasy about the sexuality of alienated boys.
New Veronia tells the story of Bennet, Jay and Toshi, three sex-craved middle schoolers who decide to build a sex utopia in the woods during summer vacation. Such an ambitious undertaking exerts pressures on the group, though and the docile and intellectual Toshi is slowly getting ostracized from the group. Bennet (the first person narrator) idolizes Jay, who is a surrogate father to him. He’s the one who comes up with ideas and projects while his old man is drinking his life away. But Jay’s violent temper and white supremacist family are up to no good whatsoever.
I know what you’re thinking.
“Kids left alone in the woods to form a bizarre, child-like utopia… is that a contemporary retelling of Lord of the Flies?” Well, yes and no. The kids in New Veronia aren’t stranded on an island. They’re merely left unsupervised to experience power relationships by themselves. It gets pretty Lord of the Flies-ish for eighty pages or so, but it gets way deeper down the rabbit hole of human darkness because the kids aren’t incentivized to work together to survive. Every night when they’re done working on New Veronia, they can go back to the “normalcy” of home. It gets really fucked up, really quick.
The overarching theme of New Veronia is control. Being physically and ideologically controlled by his white supermacist family, Jay comes up with the idea of a fiefdom he could rule. He also wants to assert physical control over Toshi, which is why he keeps him around. Bennet, who’s growing up in a structure-less home, is looking for someone to take ownership of thing, which is why he follows Jay. The dynamic between the boys is both extremely destructive and plausible. Boys that age band together for the same reasons Bennet, Jay and Toshi do.
These are terrible reasons to band together, but there’s a dull-witted straightforwardness to young boys that M.S. Coe absolutely nailed in New Veronia. The psychological accuracy is terrifying.
I had issues with the white supremacism subplot, though. I didn’t find it to be very pertinent to the overall plot of New Veronia. It’s more of a badge of villainy that Jay doesn’t really need. He’s a perfectly fine terrible human being on his own. It felt more moralizing and ominous than anything. Once a character has the white supremacist tag attached to himself in fiction, you know he’s going to meet a horrible ending unless you’re reading a white supremacist novel. New Veronia is a book about power relationships between teenage boys. It could’ve made without it.
New Veronia is pretty good. M.S. Coe understands quite well how boys think and the novel provides a wide array of terrifying what ifs that will resonate uncomfortably loud with a lot of us. If you go in expecting a retelling of Lord of the Flies, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by its boldness and unlikely nuances. It does get a little pushy whenever the author wants you to feel a certain way about a character, but it’s not exactly uncommon for first time novelist. It’s insecurity more than anything. New Veronia is coming out on November 19 from CLASH Books and it sure is worth a read.
7.1/10
