Please Let Me Destroy You by Rupert Taylor

Rupert Taylor’s ferociously original debut novel Please Let Me Destroy You is a frenzied, hallucinatory descent into the depths of artistic ambition. Narrated by would-be filmmaker Apollo Jones, it’s a sweat-drenched, globe-trotting saga that pushes narrative boundaries to their outermost limits. One part harrowing character study, one part delirious metafictional mind-bender, it’s a singularly audacious work that will burrow into your psyche like a night terror. Whether you view Apollo’s increasingly unhinged quest as uncomfortably voyeuristic or bracingly cathartic, Taylor’s headlong storytelling possesses an addictive, feverish quality you’ll struggle to shake.

Plot:

The combustible premise kicks off when Apollo suffers an epic meltdown during an ill-advised casino heist in the Cambodian jungle, throwing his grand plans for an “Untitled Original Series Set On Multiple Continents” into jeopardy. Desperate to mine the calamitous job for material, Apollo embarks on a crazed trek across Southeast Asia, Hollywood, and finally back into the sweaty abyss of Cambodia’s lush rainforests. Along the way, he gets his pinky finger sliced off by irate associates, flirts with arson and drug trafficking, and finds himself drawn into increasingly torrid creative and personal entanglements with enigmatic muse Ari.

As stranger and more hallucinatory scenarios pile atop one another, Taylor’s narrative feints grow bolder and more audacious – leaving readers perpetually off-balance as they struggle to parse reality from fiction. What begins as a comparatively straightforward (if eccentric) coming-of-age tale keeps shape-shifting into gnarlier, more tonally subversive territory. By the time Apollo returns to the Cambodian jungle for the book’s Grand Guignol climax, Taylor has steered his story into entirely uncharted waters.

Main Character Analysis:

Apollo Jones is as captivating as he is contemptible—a compellingly needy, transparently thirsty portrait of Millennial ambition taken to its self-immolating extremes. He’s the kind of infinitely punchable try-hard we all know and sort of loathe, yet Taylor renders his grating insecurities and self-effacing delusions with disarming psychological acuity. Apollo barrels ahead with subversive self-absorption, utterly lacking in self-awareness yet oozing plenty of self-sabotaging pathos.

His vainglorious quest to launch “the first Untitled Original Series Set On Multiple Continents!” is transparently idiotic, but the brazenness of his yearning taps into a primal, almost mythic aspiration—one rendered all the more visceral by the blunt, unvarnished narration. Apollo’s desperation to transcend his inner void and achieve creative immortality is so rawly, uncomfortably recognizable that you can’t help but see fragments of your own thwarted ambitions mirrored therein. He’s a grotesque yet achingly human creation.

Writing Style:

Much like his protagonist, Taylor’s narrative attack mode aims to overwhelm through sheer chutzpah. The prose is spartan and utterly unadorned, reflecting Apollo’s characteristics. Yet Taylor’s stripped-down reportage also yields outbursts of phantasmagorical lyricism when least expected—rapturous poetry erupting from the most visceral muck. Such dazzling stylistic pivot points consistently unhinge expectations, subverting the reader’s very notion of how a novel is supposed to deliver its payloads. Like Apollo burrowing ever deeper into his own tortured subjectivity, Please Let Me Destroy You transports you into realms of narrative delirium.

Themes:

While superficially a satire about artistic self-delusion, Taylor excavates much thornier themes pertaining to privilege, exploitation, and pop culture’s often parasitic relationship with “edgy” real-life source material. Apollo’s ostensible aim to channel his human collateral damage into buzzworthy entertainment is a searing indictment of a generation for whom traumatic personal experiences double as precious branding materials. There’s also a pungent critique of Hollywood’s insatiable hunger for marginalized voices it can strip-mine of authenticity then discard once drained.

But ultimately, ‘Please Let Me Destroy You’ operates on an even more primal thematic level: that of art as profane ritual and transcendental bloodletting. The recurring motifs of blood, viscera, and bodily functions suggest a primitive artistic tribalism, with Taylor’s gonzo narration opening up deeper psychic wounds with every increasingly unhinged plot escalation. Apollo’s inability to differentiate lived experiences from concocted fictions is a synecdoche for art’s power to restructure the storyteller’s own reality – for better or worse.

My Personal Take:

While Please Let Me Destroy You’s scabrous humor and brazenly anti-commercial leanings won’t be for everyone, it worked like gangbusters for this reader. From the opening chase through the Cambodian jungle, Taylor displayed an audacious command of tone and voice that yanked me into Apollo’s sweaty, hallucinatory psyche and never let go. Even as the protagonist’s actions grew more unspeakable, Taylor counterbalanced the darkness with such buoyant ironic detachment that I felt complicit in Apollo’s misadventures rather than revolted.

So much of the novel derives its sicko power from that sensation of being implicated in the narrator’s questionable values and escalating depravities. Yes, Apollo is a monstrous narcissist and an all-around appalling human being. But there’s a raw emotional transparency to his rationalizations, half-truths, and self-mythologizing that cut closer to the bone than if Taylor had rendered him a garden variety sociopath.

Instead, Apollo feels authentic in his neediness to have his talents and sacrifices validated – a dynamic that transfigures potentially off-putting solipsism into something weirdly poignant. In Taylor’s malevolent universe, storytelling isn’t a compulsion so much as a primal ritual for conjuring identity out of chaos. What could be more chillingly relatable than that?

Whether or not you can stomach the book’s Boschian forays into full-blown delirium may be a personal litmus test. But those unfazed by Taylor’s acerbic humor and penchant for viscera will likely find Please Let Me Destroy You a startlingly three-dimensional character portrait – one that eviscerates even as it inspires queasy affection. It’s a combustible combination of nihilistic satire and profound existential longing that rockets along with blistering momentum.

Wrapping It Up:

By the novel’s climactic detonation, Taylor has blasted open far more than just his antihero’s warped psyche. He’s summoned from the nethers a new mode of storytelling that explodes conventional narrative boundaries like a string of literary IEDs. For all its grueling immersion in Apollo’s delirious solipsism, Please Let Me Destroy You emerges as a daring and profoundly humane work—a portrait of the artist as infinitely punchable try-hard, yes, but one whose radical commitment to creative expression borders on heroic by the final page turn. It’s an astonishing debut from a bold new voice.