Concentration. It’s the new reality TV show that everyone is watching. Literally everyone. The show is so popular that it has a 100% viewership; other networks pause their programming to let their employees watch.
The premise of Concentration is simple. The show’s organisers plucked hundreds of ordinary citizens, at random, from the streets and transported them to a genuine concentration camp. Prisoners are stripped of their identities, starved, beaten and ultimately executed, being filmed all the while. The camp is administered by a team of guards/kapos – volunteers looking to win fame, fortune and respect on the show.
This short book manages to be many things at once: a gripping account of a girl clinging to her dignity and identity in obscene circumstances, a dark satire of reality TV obsessed culture, and a look at what it means to have one’s identity and autonomy stripped for the sake of entertainment.
I can honestly say that this is one of the finest books I’ve read in a long while and, once picked up, I didn’t put it down until it was done. Chapters are quite short, which works to the book’s advantage as it gives the reader an easy opening to pause and reflect on what has just happened. Reading a summary of Sulphuric Acid, it would be easy to assume similarity to The Hunger Games. This wouldn’t be entirely unfair, as they both hold a mirror to our society’s obsessions with youth, beauty, spectacle and other people failing, but in my opinion Sulphuric Acid has so much more to offer.
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Mr Hancock