May 14

May 14 Book Review : Victoria Brooks - Silicone God (2023)

The greatest lie modern life ever sold us is that happiness is a solo sport. That you can achieve emotional equilibrium eating frozen taquitos alone in your kitchen while watching The Office for the 13th time on your iPhone, as if self-loathing and irritable bowel syndrome were myths and not very, very inconvenient consequence of freedom. But we don’t thrive in isolation. We thrive in being seen, really seen, by another human being.

The catch is, the second you’re seen, you’re changed. Like a particle in quantum physics or a teenager on Instagram. That outside gaze can crystallize who you are… or make you feel like a fraud in your own skin. I think this is what Victoria Brooks’ Silicone God is about. But I’m not totally sure. And maybe that’s the point.

Silicone God follows Shae, a would-be professional mistress who sleeps with married men (and sometimes their wives) in search of a feeling she can’t name (or that might not even exist). It’s not exactly about sex. It’s about chasing something bigger than identity, something that flickers just out of reach every time she tries to define herself and that prevents her from living her truth as a queer woman.

That feeling, which remains abstract and invisible for most people, is embodied in Silicone God by Evaline, a silicone built sex goddess from the future with a chip on her shoulder. Don’t ask. just read.

Fucking as a means to create connection

There’s a lot of sex in Silicone God. Just know that going in. But it’s not the kind of sex you’d describe as "steamy," unless your definition of steam involves existential dread and the slow death of identity. It’s not quite pornographic either, at least not in the browser history sense. There’s mundane, transactional sex. And then there’s… whatever it is that happens when Evaline shows up. It’s not sex, it’s more like an ontological glitch wrapped in silicone and lube.

What makes the ordinary sex interesting is that Victoria Brooks doesn’t frame it as the goal. It’s not climactic, it’s diagnostic. Shae talks about her partners with what can only be called anthropological sincerity. They’re there together, physically, but never in sync. It’s like watching two people play different games on the same console.

Shae always seems to be somewhere else, wanting to be someone else. There’s a specific kind of tragedy in that: not Shakespearean, not Freudian, but something closer to Craigslist misconnection energy. And that’s where Evaline comes in. She’s a literal sex goddess from the future, which sounds absurd (because it is), but her function in the story is dead serious. She doesn’t just complicate Shae’s sex life, she detonates it. Evaline turns the act into something closer to a Lovecraftian ritual, where orgasm is just a side effect of psychic destabilization.

She’s literal, but not to be taken literally. She's metaphor-as-person, and also a person who hijacks metaphors.

By her sheer presence, as an aesthetic, a threat, a vibe, Evaline drags Shae out of her routine and into something weirder and more meaningful. Which is, in essence, what the book is doing too. Most stories go: internal change → external action. This one flips it. A physical, alien presence catalyzes an internal shift. That reversal is the key to the whole thing. It’s not about finding yourself. It’s about being found, and changed, by something so bizarre and outside your framework that it makes you realize you never really knew who you were in the first place.

Fucking your way into a higher state of being

A kinetic novel like Silicone God isn’t meant to be taken at face value. It’s not a story with a clean arc, a protagonist who changes, and a tidy resolution. The change is the plot and that change reflects something back at you. It asks: how do you even connect to other people? What does your body mean to you, beyond biology? Are you chasing love, sex, affirmation, transcendence or just the feeling of being seen?

Silicone God doesn’t behave like a conventional novel. It functions more like a diagnostic tool for your relationship to desire. It’s not telling you how to feel. It’s watching you react. It pulls something to the surface that might have been buried under years of cultural noise, and then leaves you to deal with it.

Most readers I’ve talked to report a similar response: not emotional catharsis, but intellectual fascination. The ideas are alive and writhing, but they don’t always point toward a conclusion. That’s not a flaw, it’s part of the architecture. The book feels designed to keep you suspended between clarity and ambiguity, like it’s less concerned with answers than with provoking the right kind of questions.

I don’t know if Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was a direct influence, but it hit me in a similar way. Except that maybe it’s what it would look like if a Dead Ringers-era David Cronenberg had adapted it to the big screen. Both books left me a little destabilized, like I’d read something more honest than I was prepared for.

Silicone God is not one of these novels meant to be discussed at the Oprah Book Club (does it even still exist?) It’s a dirty little evocative secret that challenges one of the most foundational human activities and that will reach the people it will reach and leave everybody else either doe-eyed and rattling or closing the novel thirty pages is and never touching it again. I have a soft spot for these books that choose you as an audience more than you choose them. And House of Vlad is turning into a premier platform for these.