Jeff Chon’s debut novel proves the need for psychologically dense, overlooked characters in our fiction for the present moment. With Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun, Chon has chosen a very forward-sitting scab to pick at on the forehead of America. Set four days before the 2016 presidential election, Chon’s characters frame our cultural moment in urgent and unforgiving ways, and his dark satire wrestles time and again with humanity’s injurious existence. Bouts of conspiracy rampant and rewriting our present tense, Chon is able to pen these unpopular glooms with a sly humor befitting his all-too-relevant tragicomic study of modern egos.
