Island Time

In the near-future setting of All You Can Kill, humanity continues to face timeless and familiar problems. People search for love, guidance, acceptance, someone to follow, and spaces where their beliefs can be validated. Despite technological and social advances, they look for answers to these existential concerns in all the wrong places. Playful, witty, and lightly sardonic, Pasha Malla’s multi-pronged satire may not offer much hope for where we’re all headed, but it has a riotous time envisioning what our destination might look like.

The book begins in medias res as the unnamed narrator and his inadvertent comrade, K. Sohail, find themselves drifting through the sky in each other’s arms —“as if we were dreaming the same dream.” Survivors of an off-page, undescribed incident, they are in a strange predicament, inexplicably aloft over the open water, without another soul in sight. As the mysterious force keeping them airborne dwindles, a helicopter suddenly appears, signalling the possibility of rescue, but it just as quickly enters the water in a plume of fire and smoke. Before long, the distressed pair land on the shore of a mysterious island.

A single word stamped on a sign —“Retreat”— is their only clue to what lies beyond the thick stretch of jungle before them. Disoriented and famished, the duo eventually stumble upon Jerome, a robot-cum-butler that speaks to them with a precious formality, punctuating every response with “Regards, Jerome.” The automaton assumes the people standing in front of him are Mr. and Dr. Dhaliwal, who have signed up for the “Ten Day ‘Love Intensifier Reboot’ ” at what turns out to be an elite wellness retreat. Piecing together that the Dhaliwals were the occupants of the downed helicopter, the castaways quickly take on their identities, if only to get a warm meal and a roof over their heads. But it’s not long before this seemingly innocuous environment grows more ominous.

The next hint that all is not well comes from Professor Sayer, a counsellor who leads their personalized “Daily Sessions.” She instructs the couple to watch an uninterrupted stream of pornography on the television in their room and record themselves replicating the on-screen contortions. But it’s hirsute Brad Beard, the celebrity motivational speaker, who is the most concerning resident of the retreat. Revered by the attendees — couples as wealthy as they are insecure — the cultish leader preaches the elusive concept of “Trunity” (truth and unity), an aspirational state of being that can be achieved only by reaching an ever-changing set of goalposts (and by buying Brad’s inexhaustible supply of recordings and books). Soon enough K. Sohail believes something pernicious is afoot. She bails for the jungle, leaving the protagonist to fend for himself. His ruse grows harder to maintain on his own and is further challenged by an unexplained murder and the unwelcome arrival of the real Dhaliwals.

Malla launches an ambitious gambit. He creates a lexicon that imbues the first-person prose with an eerie sense that we are just a few steps removed from reality. Popular sayings are rearranged by the verbose and expressive narrator into new shapes such as “a bird’s view from its eyes” and “justice of dessert.” The effect is uncanny, leaving questions about the stranded main character unanswered — Where is he from? Is English his first language? — and further tilting the stereotypical island getaway into the bizarre. Heightened surrealism puts All You Can Kill into the territory of The Lottery and Lord of the Flies as well as films like The Wicker Man, but Malla’s writing creates an original, cockeyed world in which his thematic preoccupations are revealed with incomparable precision and acuity.

While the reader follows the increasingly harried narrator through an atmosphere of escalating hostility, the author tips his poisoned arrows toward narcissistic wellness conjurers, therapy capitalism, cancel culture, and the false comforts of consumerism. His critique is presented in a setting that’s inundated with X‑rated content, blooming with abundance for the one percent, yet damned with people blistered by insecurity. At the same time, Malla deploys a surprising well of sympathy for all his characters. He waltzes around easy cynicism and condescension while grappling with the contradictions of modern life. These struggles are especially apparent in his protagonist, who eagerly tries to fit in and desperately embraces being thrust into companionship with K. Sohail, referring to her as “my wife.” And even as Brad berates and humiliates his disciples, who willingly suffer his insults in the quest for personal betterment, we feel empathy for their delusions.

All You Can Kill is an intricate moral fable, but it steps deep into the thorny briars of spiritual and economic disadvantages. With a narrator who muses on the fact that “all of us are loaded at birth onto a conveyor belt that slurps us to our invariable end,” Malla plays with the concept of survival and how it has the dangerous potential to warp our individuality. The story gives way to chaotic mobs, groupthink, and violence, but at its root, there is a profound longing to make sense of agency in uncertain times. The novel concludes with a perilous trip into a strange yet wholly recognizable void, and it’s here that Malla puts on the perfect, final smirk, revealing that boundless consumer choice to heal our existential wounds is really not a choice at all.