Megan Angelo’s debut novel, Followers, is a provocative telling of how overly consumed we are by social media today and the consequences that await our dependency. Besides her penchant for choosing obscure and inventive names for her protagonists — Orla, Floss, and Marlow — Angelo’s attempts to map a tentative future of online vanity, follower validation, and celebrity consumption are well executed. The dystopian eeriness of Followers is like an episode of Black Mirror transformed onto the page.
The story is divided into two timelines, 2015 and 2051, which are cleverly inverted dates that crawl through time to unite the intricate mystery of how the past influenced the bleak future. Woven into the plot are rumblings of an internet-based catastrophe dubbed as “The Spill,” which Angelo carefully reveals during the course of the novel. In 2051, Marlow, a celebrity representing a drug that suppresses emotions, longs to escape the Constellation, a celebrity-manufacturing community that raises children to become world-famous influencers. In 2015, Orla, a gossip columnist, and her roommate, Floss, set out to achieve internet fame by evolving Floss’s unremarkable reputation with a series of gossip articles that catapult her to stardom.
What’s most fascinating about these women is their thirsty ambitions that escalate their character development — and Followers is a wonderfully character-driven story. The romances flittering through the pages are hardly compelling compared to how desperately Orla seeks to become a published author, Floss’s destructive desire for fame, or Marlow’s quest for answers about her past and escape from the celebrity cage she’s bound to. These women are written with complex, scrutinizing, and sympathetic details that elevate the story beyond just a darkly amusing plot.
Without venturing too deeply into spoiler territory, Angelo’s visceral plot turns criticize how celebrities are stalked and harassed by paparazzi, but also how fans equipped with no more than their cellphones can replicate this harm. Her vision of how this game of “cat and mouse” can lead to sinister repercussions is a chilling account toward the book’s finale.
However, as plausible as Angelo paints a vision of the future, I’ve grown a little wary of stories that blast the narrative that the internet is inherently evil. It’s safe to say that any gathering of humans will produce a few bad apples, and while cyberwarfare certainly isn’t something to scoff at, the idea that the internet will inevitably evolve into an oppressive dystopian tool is tedious. Our willingness to believe “fake news,” overshare our information, or take everything we read at face value derives from our own laziness. While I think Angelo attempts to place blame solely on how we, as a society, use the internet, her depiction becomes too focused on the idea that everyone who uses the internet in the future will only care about celebrity influencers.
Where Angelo wins back my fervor — because as a consensus, my experience reading Followers was overwhelmingly positive — is my favourite question posited in literature: can humans change the outcome of the future by learning from the mistakes of the past? On a societal level, no. Angelo concedes that we’re doomed to reap the consequences of our fundamental vanity, but there is hope for change in the individual.
