There is something perverse about the prequel. Not so much that it repeats, sometimes verbatim, the Big Reveal we already know has happened and how it happened but rather that by its very nature in relation to the Big Reveal it is an inescapably tragic narrative device. There are no heroes strictly speaking in a prequel, just people whose horrible mistakes, poor luck, and foolish choices create the necessary conditions for a hero’s quest. For example, the 2011 prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Thing, was entirely superfluous because the film it followed/anticipated is fairly prequel-coded on its own. Much in the same way that Carpenter’s later film They Live is sequel-coded.

Yet the very fact of the prequel poses interesting narrative challenges. With the traditional arc of storytelling set aside, a writer or whoever is free to do some off-roading. Sometimes it’s better to go into caves than to scale a mountain; hence why Will Graham, though much less inspiring than Clarice Starling, is endlessly dimensional and will probably be brought back long after we’ve forgotten Hannibal. George Lucas was hardly mistaken in his making the three Star Wars prequels, only that Anakin Skywalker’s Miltonic downfall got lost in the weeds of political allegory. Perhaps if he told it backwards from corruption to innocence—à la the Hitler-shooting scene of Come and See—it would have sharpened the impact. The prequel also reveals uncomfortable truths about existence itself. A hero’s triumph does not come fully formed from the ether, it is a logical consequence that becomes conventional, rendering all that enabled it beforehand peripheral at best. And just as a standalone film can be prequel-coded, so can a standalone person.

I spent a year of my life in a situation that only makes sense to me in the prequel framing. It ticks all the relevant boxes: the ambitious yet chaotic inception, the ongoing struggle to cohere, the impending doom at the failure to do so, and the collapse into disreputable oblivion. Return magazine, for which I was a literary editor, exists in my memory on par with the abandoned colony, the burned out research facility, or the cursed videotape. And as soon as my journey had reached its end, I knew that it would catalyze its reflection in due course. The trouble was figuring out what form that reflection would take. But before we get into that, it’s probably useful to tell you what it was.

Return was a project that had been long-gestating in dream form by a friend of mine who I’d collaborated with for earlier publications. This ambitious idea was talked about often as was my joining its staff. Apparently he’d gotten the sufficient backing to request my résumé on two occasions. Between Christmas 2021 and New Year’s Day 2022, things were more serious. I was interviewed by the relevant parties, all people I’d previously known, and eventually hired to start that winter. Return was to be a magazine—and a website—that promoted “flourishing in a digital age.” Contrary to popular belief, the title was not a nod to the prevalent “retvrn” meme (not that the confusion hurt us much) but to the “return” key, complemented by our newsletter Enter. It was pitched to me as The Baffler spliced with Wired but with an aim of reaching the “dissident right,” which in the inter-Trump era was a gnarled network of podcasts, anonymous Twitter accounts, group chats, and other publications. I suppose the idea for us specifically was to be more refined and not repeat “based” clichés, seeing as how I was brought in. I didn’t have a sterling reputation as a shitposter or even as a more traditional polemicist. I was the “thoughtful” one. I had good taste. I wrote essays in high class publications (and not just conservative ones) and stories in literary journals. I’d also worked for magazines in the past (and not just my own zine).

If that seems confusing, I should add that there was a fashion spread in the first issue. The mission statement shifted depending upon whom you talked to. One of my superiors could give a new mission statement on cue. There was also the complicating factor that we were launching the website and the magazine at the same time. Nevertheless, I busied myself with generating lofty article ideas and finding people to write them. I became a dreamer myself, hoping to acquire a roster of contributors who were somehow neither hardened freelancers nor established anons, but a “mutant vanguard” that would represent the best possible future of my cultural populist vision. Obviously that did not work out, as that vanguard did not exist and may never. So it was back to freelancers, who were understandably reluctant, and anons, who were unsurprisingly not always reliable. I also fumbled in sometimes demanding too much from much sought-after contributors and driving them away. But we must remember that this is a doomed prequel, and that I am merely the vessel for the hero’s inevitable ascent. Could such a one emerge amid my content-farming frenzy?

I took well to “Barbara Genova.” In large part because she made it easy to do so. She came to me, having discovered my ExPat contributions, with an eager solicitation of her skills in my capacity as a flailing cold-caller editor. I knew nothing about her beyond the available information, which was minimal. She was not American, she was not using her real name, her Twitter feed was peppered with boasts of being a novice scribe on the make. Even as her easy way with pitches, her prompt turnaround for drafts, and a fluent command of English indicated not a little experience. In the six months we worked together she was one of our most prolific writers, turning in long, winding but still readable pieces that kept well within our brief, such as it was, more often than not. My colleagues liked her work; readers liked her work. When at some juncture I happened upon her past life as a well-known author in the Italian literary scene I found it curious but it didn’t change much. The work lasted until I got let go. Maybe a little after, even. Then she disappeared before reemerging late last year revealing both identities in a sort of dual memoir in her native language called Electra.

Once I and two of my other colleagues were given the boot, everyone moved on, though no one moved on harder than Return. It was bought by a new company that purged much of its early archive. The print magazine became Frontier, the tech aspect seemingly played down but otherwise ready for the “Everything is computer!” era. But Return stayed with Genova.1 So much so that it makes up a whole chapter of her book, perhaps the only recorded account that exists. That piqued my interest, to be sure; though ever getting to read it seemed unlikely. I’d either have to learn Italian or wait for an excerpt that could withstand a passable Google translation to somehow appear. Turns out I didn’t have to do the former.

The excerpt leaves out a lot of context that led her not only to adopt a pseudonym, but a new identity to go with it, suited to a new country and language. She writes feverishly in English, submitting and pitching around the same literary journals where I appear. She reaches out to me in a moment where any writer is precious. I send her ideas, she submits an expansive essay on muting, I rearrange some sections, publish it, and get her paid and a new audience. Everyone is happy as far as I can tell. Conflicts arise when she looks into the publication and its parent company, the name of which is eerily similar to the authoritarian political party in The First Purge. “Reading the name ‘New Founders’ on the company website makes my mouth freeze,” Genova writes. “Who did I get involved with?”

I ask an old friend for a second opinion … at least legally, does the website seem in order to you? It looks like a typical conservative think tank, he says, and this time I don’t reply: homie, no, it’s much worse. To a native eye certain nuances may escape, but on the company website it says “return” everywhere. Return to tradition, return to digital sovereignty, return to spirituality.

See what I mean? Of course she doesn’t get deep within the organization, her contact is “a misanthrope from Delaware who … works remotely from a house or a tool shed ….” Can you guess who that is? If not, she helpfully expands below. “My supervisor—let’s call him Jordan—… the misanthrope from Delaware, I met him on the literary magazine circuit and it is with him that the discipline of critical work awakens in me. With him it’s all thought. He sees me. Glasses, grim face. … Jordan watches a lot of films …” Excluding, to my ultimate peril, the Purge franchise.

Being so perceived, let alone in Italian, would have been incomprehensible to me from my desk in special ed math. Being perceived with Delaware citizenship is a horror that defies easy description. Though neither seem to be as acute as the Genova’s astonishment of being able to get paid for quality work in an evil vortex. “On the one hand, these guys are thinking big. There's a lot to learn. They work day and night. … On the other hand, they're Nazis—on the other hand, the New Founders are pushing hard enough to name themselves after the evil eugenicists in a series of horror movies.” (FFS, did IM-1776 have to put up with this shit?)

She connects with more people, people of surprising talents (and who are more easily identifiable because she remembers where they live). She is thrilled by this new experience. It’s not new. Artists and intellectuals working in respectable (i.e., left-of-center) spaces become disillusioned, or otherwise exiled, and like Winona Ryder in Heathers they drift to the losers’ table only to find themselves charmed by the sociopathic occupants. It’s reinvigorating, it’s transgressive, it’s condescending. Exiles, whether expatriates, exvangelicals, or “ex”-leftists, have much the same pose, coming into a new scene with an almost naif sincerity while exalting their outsider status as a sixth sense that penetrates into that scene far deeper than its longtime participants.

It becomes pleasant to mingle with them, to the extent of the dark pleasure that can be given by the act of rummaging through their obsessions documented in a two or three day delay: for work I have to pretend that their psychiatric limitations have a social meaning … I have to simulate neutrality …

From this on-the-nose Conradian stance, Genova expounds more broadly on a brain-drain from the center to the fringe.

Extremists finance culture every day. The far right courts a particular kind of “non-aligned” artist—the heterodox, the marginal, the fallen, the never famous, men and women with a harsh character who struggle to fit into a work group because they believe they are worth more, on the one hand, and on the other they tell themselves that in any case everything sucks and the enemy is at the gates—for them and with them the far right produces sumptuous illustrated magazines, produces conferences, produces ambitious platforms, produces works of art that pay immediately.

Conservatism is not the new punk rock; conservatism is the new porn industry. It is dubiously legal yet luridly chic. And if it cannot be crusaded against, its unrepentant denizens—its Jamie Gillises and Nina Hartleys—may be brought to shame. An astute observation if your conception of the American right does not extend beyond an explosion from the asshole of an undead Julius Evola into a Coachella porto-john during Ice Spice’s third encore. It overlooks the currents of refinement already evident right-of-center. Frank Meyer, the dour fusionist and another non-Delawaran of note, was an enviable byline headhunter for National Review. Matthew Continetti reminds us of how he “filled the books-and-arts pages with eclectic literary and cultural criticism by young contributors such as Joan Didion, John Leonard, Guy Davenport, and Garry Wills, who did not check all the movement-conservative boxes.” And even after they’d moved on, D. Keith Mano provided consistently lively work amid contributions to Playboy, Oui, and Esquire, to say nothing of his novels and television writing.

But let’s grant Genova’s Nathanael West conception of the right. If I understand her Google-translated words correctly, my name—my real name—is cursed to history unless I choose a more aspirational path. I’m not sure what there is to aspire to. Genova espouses a worldview as Manichaean, as close-minded, and as reactionary as that of the right-wingers she detests. And she has an anon’s flair for subterfuge. Why? I don’t know. She was not an employee. I did not demand exclusivity. Her contributions did not forward any agenda beyond giving a rapidly declining literacy-positive population something interesting to read. If the stench of the losers’ table became that unbearable, she could’ve left as some are now. Hell is empty; it is also in Delaware.

Maybe all this goes to show that you should not meet your villains. Villains can disappoint as much as heroes. Some villains, it turns out, lack a dualistic nature, they are a little too trusting, a little too flexible, a little too relaxed. They don’t take the arc of history as a given but think everything is going to be fine. They are imperfect in entirely average ways; they can make bad judgments (like right now maybe) and fail but they are not stupid and may not even be all that cynical. They can think outside of themselves from time to time. Villains can do good work, even in contexts that give heroes the ick. Because a villain can understand that talent does not confer entitlements or destiny; talent is often absurd. Villains probably do watch too many movies, villains will cop to that.