Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke Review

Gerald is stuck in Slack - quite literally! But how did his soul get into it and how can he escape? Meanwhile, his colleagues at their NYC copywriting firm continue work on their latest crisis client, Bjark Dog Food, whose products are somehow only killing pomeranians and they need to urgently handle the public response. And what’s going on with Lydia who can hear howls outside her apartment all day every day but can’t see any dogs or wolves - and each day the howls are getting closer…

Calvin Kasulke’s debut novel Several People Are Typing is a clever take on stories like Tron and 2001: A Space Odyssey for the post-pandemic world, though it feels original rather than derivative, and I found it quite an enjoyable read.

If you’re not au fait with Slack, it’s an online workspace where you can instant message co-workers, hold video meetings, manage calendars, etc. - basically a communal version of Outlook. And the novel is presented entirely in the form of instant messages, which is brilliant given the premise, and also surprisingly effective - an omniscient narrator/descriptions wouldn’t have added much and you’re not missing anything by just getting the dialogue.

The story doesn’t have any real urgency - Gerald seems relatively unconcerned with his condition for the most part and things settle into the usual workday grind almost immediately - but the book is a really quick read because of the format. It’s like reading a play minus the stage directions.

Emojis are presented in text form, so you don’t get the images themselves, which leads to some amusingly incomprehensible pages where the participants spam emojis at each other and it looks like complete gibberish on the page. It also adds to the speed of the read as you easily fly through dozens of pages in a sitting - it’s like if social media-scrolling had pages, most people would probably get through a novel’s worth of “pages” per day.

A lot of the book is full of banal office talk stuff - pets, kids, lunches/drinks, desk territorialism, deadlines, workload management - and a cliched office romance is thrown in. There are supernatural elements dotted throughout - Lydia and her howls, the whole Gerald being trapped in Slack, and the surprise villain of the piece - but these are spread out across the whole novel so that the narrative is only intermittently interesting.

As a result, there isn’t any build-up to a finale - it’s as quickly resolved as it occurs in the beginning. There’s no explanation for why something so surreal happened, and it wasn’t totally clear what the subtext was - whether this was a metaphorical take on contemporary work culture or not; there’s too many literal elements to feel like it was going for something like that anyway - but I was fine with that. It’s an entertaining enough story for what it is and it’s not like it could’ve been explained anyway.

The story as a whole never really had any narrative tension, it was just an ambling, semi-comedic, semi-horror mash-up that came together surprisingly well at times. It reminded me most of Douglas Coupland’s novels Microserfs and JPod which are also set in similar workplaces with similar personalities/concerns and are also creatively presented on the page (the boss’s name is also Doug - maybe a knowing nod?).

Several People Are Typing isn’t the most gripping read nor does the story feel all that memorable, unlike the format, but it’s entertaining enough with the mundane material never sticking around long enough to bore you for long. An intriguing and original debut novel from Calvin Kasulke that fans of Douglas Coupland might find enjoyable.