Finished: 8/12/20
Grade: B+
A cartoonishly pretentious film critic with delusions of grandeur discovers a 3 month long animated film that he believes will be his ticket to greatness. After the film is destroyed in a fire, he spends the rest of his life trying to remember it.
With an unreliable narrator in an unreliable world that includes time travel, alternate realities, dream-states, hypnotism, drug trips, meta fictional elements, cartoonish exaggeration, and magical realism, this is a novel with no solid ground. It is a nervous breakdown, or a fever dream, or maybe 6 different books put into a blender.
A good portion of this massive novel feels like a famous screenwriter throwing spaghetti at the wall because he knows he can get away with it, but you can make it through the first 300 pages (and abandon any hope of a satisfying conclusion) Antkind unfolds into something wild and wonderful.