The Last Days of Video -- a review by Jill Hand

 

Imagine if someone similar to Ignatius J. Reilly, the irascible hero of  A Confederacy of Dunces, owned an independent video store. That’s the premise behind Jeremy Hawkins’ The Last Days of Video: A Novel. (Soft Skull Press, 2015.)

The book opens with a passage from “Dunces,” John Kennedy Toole’s tragicomic masterpiece set in the New Orleans of the early 1960s. Ignatius Reilly hates everything about popular culture: the music, the clothing, the abomination that is television. He resists taking paying employment, preferring to live with his mother while working on a lengthy and unlikely-to-be-published manuscript, which asserts that Western society has declined horribly since the Enlightenment. 

Hilarity ensues when he grudgingly agrees to a stint as a vendor for Paradise hotdogs. He fails epically, gorging himself on the product he’s supposed to be selling. He manages to offend a group of prissy ladies by decorating his hot-dog cart with a sign on which he has written “Twelve Inches (12) of Paradise.”

Like Ignatius Reilly, Waring Wax, the owner of Star Video, is a terrible businessman. He loves films, seemingly knowing everything there is to be known about every movie ever made, but he prefers watching them to taking an active part in renting them to paying customers. 

Waring spends his days lounging on a battered sofa inside the dusty, cavernous confines of Star Video, located in an imaginary North Carolina college town. He hides from the store’s few customers, watching movies, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer while his employees do all the work. 

Beautiful, troubled Alaura and shy Jeff love movies almost as much as Waring does. When signs go up in the window of a nearby building, announcing the arrival of a Blockbuster, the trio is spurred into action. They resolve to save Star Video by implementing a daring plan, but it may be too late.

The Last Days of Video is an endearing tribute to a bygone era, one in which a Friday-night trip to a video store to peruse the new releases and select DVDs to rent was an end-of-week ritual. The sinister arrival of Red Box and rumors of something called “Netflix” foreshadow the doom of even the mighty Blockbuster. Waring Wax realizes this but his enemies, the haughty employees of the neighboring Blockbuster don’t.

If you love quirky characters who (often maddeningly) fail to act in their best interests, and if you’re nostalgic for the days when every town had at least one video store, you’ll enjoy The Last Days of Video. It’s a sweetheart of a novel.

About the reviewer:

Jill Hand is a reclusive, nocturnal mammal with sharp claws and acute hearing. She likes marzipan and coffee. She is the author of White Oaks and Black Willows, both Southern Gothic thrillers from Black Rose Writing.