There Is No Antimemetics Division: The Burden of Ideas

by Kate Foster Curtis-Hawkins

At its core, QNTM’s novel, a reworking of his earlier series of short stories originally posted to the SCP Foundation wiki, represents the incredible power of idea generation within the internet. It's fitting that the novel was released only 6 months before Obsession and backrooms would hit theaters, but the origins of this work are older than Curry Barker’s YouTube channel and Kane Parson’s short films. In fact, the cultural milieu that would eventually give birth to this novel is as old as the smart phone.

The first story that would eventually lead to the creation of the SCP Foundation was published to the paranormal board of 4chan in 2007. By 2008, the series of interrelated files on paranormal artifacts and monsters had its own independent wiki. Now, in 2026, that wiki has nearly 10,000 entries all independently written by individual contributors. The site has no ads, it has no profit motive, and its web design still evokes the halcyon days of the internet when it felt like anything was possible. There is a very real sense of nostalgia for me in remembering these times, because I was an active user of the SCP wiki during my time in high school. Preferring to spend my computer lab time browsing through the corridors of a secure Foundation facility rather than doing whatever it was that had been assigned to me, having my head filled with ideas about what I might come up with to add to the site and its byzantine corridors.

There Is No Antimemetics Division is a novel about ideas: how they spread, how they worm their way into the subconscious of humanity, how they pervert our relationships to one another, and ultimately how they shape the world around us. To the degree that this novel has a traditional plot, that’s what I would say it's about. But this book does not read anything like a traditional novel. Its timeline is completely out of sync with any real chronology, the characters can’t remember crucial events, the very existence of certain places and people change, and the relationships between each of the principle cast members are subject to change at any time. But, unlike most novels, those parts of the composition aren’t bugs, they’re features.

The characters of this book work for a division of a secret organization that deals with antimemes: Essentially any phenomena that have the ability to make you forget their existence as soon as you leave their presence. The true definition of an antimeme is far more complicated, so trust that your reviewer has done her best in simplifying it for the purpose of this review. This focus makes the division’s work inherently complicated, and QNTM comes up with many inventive ways to advance his plot forward in spite of the fact that the very narrative he is writing could make digestibility for the reader next to impossible. That being said, there is probably no amount of work he could have done to make the text read fully coherently, and still keep his ideas intact, and that is both the greatest strength, and weakness of this text.

There Is No Antimemetics Division reads more like a series of short stories than it does a novel, at least until the final hundred or so pages. This is certainly, in part, due to the fact that it initially was a series of short stories, but not enough was done, in my opinion, to restructure them so that they cohere into one long piece of narrative fiction. I understand that doing so would have likely involved extensive re-writing of both the structure and material on hand, but if the publisher isn’t willing to guide QNTM through that process, then why choose to publish this as a novel rather than a collection? Especially given that it had been originally published as a collection of stories.

This tension between the book’s point of origin and its newest iteration is never more clear than in the first hundred or so pages. During these introductory chapters, the reader is introduced to some of the principal characters and threats that will be present for the rest of the book, but they largely read as lightly interconnected vignettes until we discover that the protagonist is married. A feeling that is not at all helped by the fact that each of these chapters effectively follows the same formula:

1) It’s a normal day at work

2) Oh god it’s actually not normal at all

3) How am I supposed to defeat this?

4) I survived, but I forgot

This formula does work, and QNTM’s horror writing is effective enough to both scare and intrigue the reader, but I found myself wondering what the central plot thread was going to be and how these different elements were going to fit together. I got my answer to the former around 42% of the way through the book, but unfortunately the latter never happens. Not all of the work that QNTM does to set up his world and its characters gets successfully re-incorporated by the time you finish the story.

Some of these vignettes are great, and the second chapter stands out as something that not only hooked me but that I think any writer would have been proud to put their name on, but that is far from a consistent standard of the book.

Because the horror is so abstract, and the abilities of the characters to grasp it even more so, it is often hard for the reader to actually understand what is going on. A fact which becomes a bigger problem once the central narrative gets moving and QNTM needs to finally describe both the threat his characters are facing, and the solution that will defeat it. In this regard, Antimemetics Division is less successful. At no point did I feel as though I actually understood what was going on, at least not in full. There were aspects of the story that I definitely grasped, and individual constructions of the themes and world were presented well, but I could not articulate to you what actually happened.

On the one hand, this creates a feeling within the reader that is also felt by the characters, which should be the goal of any writer. On the other hand, the way QNTM goes about this doesn’t make for the best reading experience if your goal is to grasp what he’s up to. In essence, There Is No Antimemetics Division is filled with great ideas, but is lacking in execution largely due to the nature of those ideas, and the writer's decisions in how to depict them.

Perhaps, at this juncture, it would be worth examining this book in comparison to the works of an author who QNTM is clearly inspired by. There are debts of inspiration owed to a number of writers, particularly to Jeff VanderMeer and other luminaries of the New Weird movement, but H.P. Lovecraft remains the grandfather of everyone approaching the cosmic horror genre. His work was similarly abstract both in its ideas and threats but he understood that the abstraction in and of itself is where the fear lay. After all, not many people are afraid of what a giant squid-man might look like, but nearly everyone is afraid of what an incomprehensible giant squid-man represents.

Much like how the lead up to a jump scare is actually scarier than whatever pops up on screen, when you attempt to put a face to inherently cosmological concepts or philosophical ideas, you lose some of the magic in the abstract nature of the work you’re doing. This is why, when push comes to shove, QNTM ends up describing his novel’s central villain as a giant spider, even though what that spider represents is a malignant idea. Maybe even fascism. But it is unclear why he chooses this form for his antagonist, or why the very concept itself would have a physical form. And of course, not everyone is afraid of spiders, but most are afraid of fascism.

Some critics of Lovecraft’s writing will call his refusal to describe the horrors in his stories as lazy, or uninteresting, but I disagree. It is far more likely that my, or anyone’s, imagination is going to fill a descriptive void better than how an author would choose to depict something, particularly if what they are trying to depict is abstruse. After all, the idea of a murderous color that comes from outer space, which leads to possession and insanity, is far more terrifying than if you’re shown that that color is magenta.

This dynamic is precisely why the most effective elements of the book come when a character is discovering something. For me, the best chapter of the novel is “Case Colorless Green” when Quinn discovers that a containment space in the facility is actually being used as a war room for the fight between the Antimemetics Division and the central antagonist of the book. That moment of pure terror in discovery, and the gesturing towards the incomprehensibility of the threat is pure cosmic horror.

There are plenty of moments like this in the book, so it's not as though QNTM was only able to do it once. When another agent discovers just how massive the entity possessing the target of his field mission is, he describes the failure of his effort to save the host as “trying to poison an ocean.” When Adam Quinn discovers that the world is ever so slightly wrong, it begins by an entire orchestra ceasing to play while he continues. At another point, an airlock door is forced open, and the implication of that is so terrifying that it might as well be the most horrifying part of the book, and it's due to the implication of it opening, not that something spooky looking happens to walk out.

What does not work, at least for this reader, is for all of that effective groundwork and atmosphere to be used towards such simplistic ends. The great evil that lurks in the background are spiders, giant baby-like beings, fleshy aliens with multiple eyes, and people that can still walk with mortal wounds. Why drive a hundred miles only to end at a Walmart?

There Is No Antimemetics Division is a novel of contradictions that left me wanting both more and less of it. I wanted more of QNTM’s ideas, but less of his execution of those ideas. I appreciated his take on the great ocean of collective unconscious that informs our humanity, but not the machine he conjures that allows us to inject ourselves into it. It takes real maturity as a writer to be comfortable with ambiguity, and it's clear that QNTM is, at least in part, because the conclusion of his debut novel leaves the reader with a perfect understanding of his central thesis: Ideas are constantly waging war in the background of our daily lives, consuming each other and influencing all that we are. That it is an invisible battle of cosmic proportions which never ends. I just wish he hadn’t told me what it looked like.