Dragon Day Review

I’d like to start this review with my cards on the table. I consider Matt Pegas a friend, or at least, a good acquaintance. I’m a fan of the podcast that he co-hosts as well as a fan of the publishing house his book is distributed out of. That said, I would not dare to insult him or dilute my integrity by heaping undo praise onto him where it wasn’t earned, but all things being the same, I feel it would be wrong not to add this information.

Dragon Day is the Incel’s Bildungsroman. The term, which has been used derisively by our circles to describe the trite garbage produced by the intersectional cabal that runs the modern publishing industry and who act as petty gatekeepers to the mainstream and upper crust literary circles alike, is not meant to be an insult in this case, but merely a description of the protagonist’s downward spiral from awkward student to brainwashed ideologue. 

The novel is told from the perspective of a pair of protagonists, though on my second read-through, the secondary protagonist, Charles, feels more like a late addition meant to answer questions the reader may have and convey information that our primary protagonist, Toby, has no way of knowing. Toby is a second-semester freshman, back from his winter break and starting the new year newly single, his girlfriend from the prior semester ending their courtship with the all too familiar desire to get space and the dreaded “remain friends”. Toby does what many young men do in his position, pumping iron to improve his self-esteem as well as his standing with women on campus.

At the gym, Toby meets professor Wallingford and after an awkward interaction, Wallingford smells fresh blood in the water, sexually assaulting the physically and spiritually weak Toby. Toby walks away from the encounter now changed and his descending path towards destruction is catalyzed, revolving around Wallingford. Pegas creates an interesting dynamic between Toby and Wallingford, a twisted version of the Greco-Roman man-boy relationships found in the gymnasium. One must assume this parallel was intentional as Toby, from then on out, actively seeks out Wallingford and performs all manner of debauched and degrading acts to ingratiate himself with Wallingford, his research, and gain membership to the exclusive “Yellow House” of which Wallingford is the faculty in residence of.

Toby’s is a cautionary tale for young men of this and future generations. Quiet wallflowers with little to no masculine influence in their lives, ripe for the picking for older, more confident predators to scoop up, the college equivalent of “free candy” spray-painted on a windowless work van. Toby, in his efforts to find some sort of identity and purpose, becomes a willing pawn to Wallingford’s agenda and in the end, commits an act of terrorism on one of the school’s most celebrated holidays, the titular Dragon Day.

Charles, meanwhile, seems to be Toby’s foil in every way. Where Toby is at first a political “normie” who is radicalized by Wallingford, Charles shifts further towards the center from a previously far-left persuasion. Charles is a gay grad student who at first works with then tries to expose Wallingford, in contrast with Toby: a straight freshman whose orbit to Wallingford grows closer and closer until the novel’s end. Other than this function and his background work to save Toby and stop Wallingford, there is little more to say about Charles.

This critique of Charles can expand to most of the rest of the cast of Dragon Day. The characters feel more like chess pieces that the writer has arranged to score a checkmate, rather than real people trying to attain goals.

The most interesting and deep character, Wallingford, does not convince me that he understands his own motivations and there is a large leap between what Wallingford says he wants and what ends up happening. Wallingford sends his brainwashed and submissive plaything to kill and maim as many people as possible, for no other reason that Toby can describe other than “to not be a pussy”. Acts of terrorism are meant to enact some sort of change. The bombing in Dragon Day creates shock and awe, but does nothing for the advancement of Wallingford and his cause and instead blows up his life along with Toby, forcing him to uproot his family to parts unknown and scatter his budding homo-fascist movement into the wind. For nothing. 

Pegas explains these holes with Charles, whose investigations into online circles and Wallingford reveals the professor’s intimate involvement in Toby’s suicide bombing, but the point for me still stands that this Machiavellian genius did not account for the only person who posed a threat to him. 

However harsh that criticism is, I can wave most of it away because of how interesting and thought-provoking I find Professor Wallingford. He is a Machiavellian Genius, utilizing the soft power of social pressure, the unsatiated barbarism of the mob (our so-called talented young minds of academia), and unscrupulous use of critical theory and popular sentiments around social justice to get what he wants. 

He not only gets away with raping Toby (and a fair amount of other students, though it is never really explicitly said), ousting the previous chairman of the English department, and building a personality cult that could rival that of Mao Zedong, though on a much smaller scale of course. He also can build and conceal an online movement of homosexual fascists that preach the rejection of gynocentrism, all that is ugly, and the projection of strength above all other virtues. He does all this while talking the talk about “stolen indigenous land”, safe spaces, #metoo sentiments, and every other pet project of leftist boredom that can be found in your average student union and Starbucks waiting line.

Wallingford flips back and forth between critical theory leftist and full-blown Hitler wannabe, it is almost unbelievable. Couple this with his theory of “Literary Phalology”, an actual dick-measuring contest between all writers of the Western Cannon, and we have the amalgamation of fears of center-right academics who preach against the scourge of “Post-Modernism” in college curriculums. It is fine for the left to entertain such ideas, but the real trouble comes when they are adopted by the far right.

It is evident from this book that there is a great novel somewhere in Matt Pegas and while I would recommend this to anyone who wishes to understand the plight of young men today, I wait in the wings for his next book and hopes he builds off of the parts of this book that work, improves the characterization and motivations of his characters, and puts in the same level of analysis and work that he did with Dragon Day.