I remember I enjoyed this book, but I can’t remember why. 🙂

Okay, no, I’m kidding. That’s actually an in-joke for people who have already read the book. It happens, you know, that sometimes someone will read a book and then look up the reviews afterward. I do this myself pretty routinely.

If you think about it, it’s odd. Why should I read a review of a book I already read? Well, sometimes I’ve forgotten some detail and it’s faster to remind myself by reading a review than by looking it up. Or sometimes I just want to know what other people think.

Which again, is odd. Why does it matter what other people think? Surely all that matters is what I think–at least, that’s all that matters to me, right?

Well, that would be true, if you consider ideas as merely static, unchanging things. But what if we consider ideas as dynamic entities, separate from the minds that create them? Ideas are after all transmissible from person to person. Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme“, analogous to the gene in the realm of biology, to describe these replicating units of information, and with it, invented the science of memetics.

Okay, so then what is antimemetics?

Trick question; there is no such thing. Hence the title and the nonexistence of an antimemetics division.

Actually, no. That’s not true. But it is very hard to describe something that is about the negation of ideas; the erasure of knowledge because it is too dangerous to know about. The first rule of the anitmemetics club is that you literally can’t talk about the antimemetics club, because to talk about it is to cause it to exist. You have to instead find a way to talk around the problem without actually stating it.

Which, as you may have noticed, is exactly what I am doing in this review by not mentioning any specifics about the book for as long as possible. Forgive me; I couldn’t help paying tribute to the book’s central theme this way. But now, since you probably are expecting a review to provide information and not antiformation, I’ll give some specifics.

This is a psychological horror book that messes with the reader’s head. Every chapter is a little vignette depicting the members of the Antimemetics Division trying to piece together a mystery—a mystery which they usually begin to forget exists the longer they study it. It’s implied there have been many iterations of the Antimemetics Division, with the history of each being periodically forgotten.

I’ve often said that what I really like in a book is a story that messes with your head so much you start questioning your whole understanding of reality. That’s basically the whole point of this book, so naturally I enjoyed it. It’s weird, unsettling, mind-bending—and also, in a few places, surprisingly funny and even at times a little romantic. You’ll see what I mean.

The only part I didn’t really like was the ending, which was so abstract and confusing it was hard to even relate to what was happening. But maybe that was inevitable given the nature of the story.

I still recommend the book to fans of weird fiction. The ending is so disconnected from the rest that it couldn’t even ruin it. If you like having your mind bent in all sorts of crazy directions, you’re bound to enjoy this strange and unsettling voyage into a world of unthinkable, unnameable things.