To get myself in the right headspace for my chat with Alex Kazemi, I listen to LFO’s “Summer Girls,” which figures in his debut novel New Millennium Boyz. Over a cheery pop beat, lead singer Rich Cronin raps a series of familiar references: New Kids on the Block, Abercrombie & Fitch, Macaulay Culkin, Pez candies. The pages of New Millennium Boyz are similarly packed with shout-outs to the cultural touchstones of the late ’90s and early 2000s. MTV, Eminem, and Fiona Apple are just a few of the big names featured. But buyer beware: this is no Buzzfeed listicle, no nostalgic tribute to a better bygone era. Instead of painting idyllic visions of a Y2K that never really existed, New Millennium Boyz depicts the age through the lens of Brad Sela, a supposed “good kid” who finds himself seduced into a series of ethically questionable activities by a dangerous loner named Lusif. As their violent delights propel them toward a violent end, Kazemi investigates the mundanity of teen male violence against the uncanny backdrop of the monoculture of the time. School shootings, Satanism, and sexual sadism are just some of the specters that loom over this literary spin on the “extreme teen” genre.

Kazemi has long hovered around celebrity, both materially and spiritually. He first emerged as an expert on harnessing the occult for self-help purposes (as chronicled in his 2013 book Pop Magic), winning the admiration of such stars as Taylor Swift, Bella Thorne, and Shirley Manson. His 2015 short Mudditchgirl91, starring influencer @InternetGirl as a teen who finds herself obsessed with a certain Internet user named Mudditchboy, caught the eye of another Manson, this one named Marilyn. With New Millennium Boyz, he shifts his focus to a different kind of (antichrist) superstar—the teenage killer. As one might expect from its turn-of-the-century setting, New Millennium Boyz exists in the shadow of Columbine, engaging with the dark mythos that the shooters left behind.

Alas, both Kazemi and I know far too much about the massacre’s legacy: I immersed myself in Columbine-related research for my college thesis on teen radicalization, while Kazemi spent a whopping ten years studying it to ensure that his novel would represent the surrounding climate as authentically as possible. When we hop on Zoom with each other, he tells me he’s been manifesting the opportunity to speak with someone who’s as well-versed in the topic as he is. And he is well-versed: deep in a flow state, he fires off references to not only well-known primary sources such as the infamous “basement tapes” in which the shooters said their goodbyes, but also rarer texts such as “the AOL chat logs” and “the breakfast run video.” Speaking to him, I see that his interest in the subject is far from lurid. New Millennium Boyz, despite its graphic content, is no splatterpunk schlock fest—it’s a sincere examination of the circumstances that have led us to this point, where a school shooting can have such an irreversible societal impact that two writers with no personal relation to any involved parties can find themselves discussing it at length in a nationally syndicated magazine 24 years later. What follows is an abbreviated version of our two-hour conversation.

BRITT: Obviously, there are some notable parallels between Brad and Lusif and the Columbine shooters. They’re always recording home videos, Lusif posts his manifesto on a secret website that’s discovered by a third friend… Did you intend to cast them into these archetypes? Where do the similarities begin and end?

ALEX KAZEMI: I did want to have Lusif mirror parts of Eric Harris’s mythology and lore that were public [immediately after the shooting]. Because even at that time, [people] were discussing all of these things on message boards. They were aware of Dylan Klebold’s “Wrath” shirt. There were “Columbiners”—even though this wasn’t the Tumblr era, there were people who were obsessing over them. I wanted Lusif to be a self-aware, performative-type killer. But also, the boys’ relationship is directly correlated to what I found out about their friendships through books, through reading interviews with Susan Klebold [Dylan Klebold’s mother]… The fact that Dylan was a depressive and Eric Harris was psychopathic… It was kind of a bondage, dom-sub thing. What I made different was, Dylan and Eric brought out something similar in each other that they already had, while Brad was more so using Lusif as an opportunity to produce intensity and create chaos in his life in the way that teenage boys do. I was very inspired by the film Thirteen. 

B: I can definitely see that. There’s this common conception when people talk about Columbine that Eric Harris was the “leader” and Dylan Klebold was the “follower.” Would you place Lusif and Brad into these roles, or would you argue that it’s more complicated than that?

ALEX: I’m sure it was extremely complicated. If we think of how isolated teenagers felt back then because of the monoculture… Young men were bullied by jocks and obsessed with subverting the type of masculinity that they felt like they could never really embody. That’s why [Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris] were obsessed with more industrial male figures and bands that kids at their school weren’t into. I do think that they’re each a victim of their own complexity, and maybe there is something kind of reductive about those roles. What do you think?

B: I tend to think there’s something a little reductive as well. It was actually Dylan’s “idea” to carry out the school shooting; he’s the one who put the desire into words first, even though Eric might’ve been more of a driving force.

ALEX: For sure. And I also think there were softer parts about Eric, which definitely inspired Brad’s character. I mean, the letters between Aurora and Brad are directly correlated to me studying the AOL transcripts. 

[We discuss “the AOL transcripts”—records of conversations that Eric Harris had with a female friend or love interest over IM. I bring up the love letter that Susan DeWitt, Eric Harris’s prom date, addressed to his spirit after the massacre, comparing its tone to that of Aurora’s letters.]

ALEX: I think what makes New Millennium Boyz different from Elephant or Zero Day or any of these other Columbine-inspired works is that I really go to bat to show the boys’ desire for fame. They were writing about their aspirations of success and fame through the shooting. It’s haunting to think that this event so powerfully infiltrated American history and pop culture at the time… It was very Machivellian. As much as they were sad and depressed, there was something malignantly narcissistic about what they did.

B: For sure. Brad is internally conflicted about the more violent activities that he and Lusif participate in. If you look at the transcripts of Columbine shooters’ videos as well as their writings, you can see that they also express internal conflict and remorse. They talk about wanting to make a conscious effort to shut down their emotions. Is this something you wrote into Lusif’s character as well?

ALEX: Yeah. That’s something I thought about a lot. Reading Eric’s journals as a teenager really freaked me out ’cause it’s like, Oh God, a lot of teenagers feel this way. Like when Eric talks about how no one ever called him—“You all had my number, you never called me.” [While writing New Millennium Boyz], I thought of those deep-cut moments in the research that I did and said, Ok, let’s magnify that little detail and turn that into a scene, or Let’s explore that a bit deeper. I feel like Lusif is a bit more vapid. Brad’s complexity is a bit more similar to what the Columbine killers might have been going through. But they both represent this male archetype that I was fascinated by. This lineage—Elliot Rodger, Adam Lanza, Luka Magnotta. I was sort of figuring out the common threads amongst all these types of people…

I think a lot of people wanted me to be like Bret [Easton Ellis] and just be completely satirical and ridiculous. But I do delve into a sentimental aspect of boyhood, an emotional part of it. And I think that’s why everyone feels very confused when they leave the book. 

B: There’s a line in the book where Lusif claims that he doesn’t have any deeper motive for the shooting beyond fame. Do you believe him when he says this?

ALEX: I kind of do. For his particular character, outside of Eric and Dylan, I wanted him to be a histrionic, flamboyant, kind of Michael Alig school shooter in that way, and also in the way that he references Manson’s Antichrist Superstar era. Lusif is someone who is self-aware, but there’s also this aspect of him where he’s so inside of the television reality. He’s so in the world that he’s building and recording and almost at this level of megalomaniac delusion…

I tried to make my book a response to the extreme teen genre and the fetishization amongst Gen Z and millennials of teen movies in the ’90s and early 2000s… It’s a reaction rather than a celebration of the genre. It was very confusing to me when I got the ask for a content warning because they thought that it was glamorizing the stuff. I thought that it was very clearly an evisceration of the culture.

B: Is there a reason that you chose to cut off the story just before Lusif is purported to carry out the school shooting? Were you concerned that readers might find such a scene too objectionable?

ALEX: It’s fascinating, the way I’ve seen different people’s interpretations of the ending. A lot of people don’t think Lu even did it, and a lot of people don’t think Brad killed himself. So there’s people who take it literally, and people who think Lu pulled this Machivellian Cruel Intentions game on Brad and that it was all just a fucking hoax. There is a separation from the other type of Columbine-related media [in that ] I don’t show it. I don’t show him going through the murder. I don’t show Brad showing up trying to stop it. I don’t show any of this stuff and I guess that makes it a bit more haunting or strange. I think there was a point where they asked me to write it, and I was like, No, there’s something that doesn’t feel right to me thematically. I don’t want to tie it off like this.

B: There’s definitely a homoerotic undercurrent to the boys’ relationship in the book. What inspired you to write that in?

ALEX: I saw that a lot in teenage boy culture. I did want a level of homoeroticism between the boys and also [wanted to allude to] news articles that were like, “[The Columbine shooters] were gay lovers.” I wanted to play with that and also just make it a bit more queer and ambiguous. There’s all these archetypes in teen girl movies: teen girls are bitches, teen girls are mean, teen girls are cruel, teen girls make out with each other at sleepovers. There are all these archetypes that are kind of based in misogyny and fantasy. But we never ever see that explored in a teenage boy movie. So I wanted to say, Let’s take a step back from all of the teen girl cruelty and look at the cruelty of teenage boys and the world that they’re growing up in.

I’m grateful that you haven’t complained about all the pop culture references in the book, because a lot of people have wanted to murder themselves about the oversaturation. But what I was trying to do was depict to the reader that this was that time—the oversaturation of pop culture and teenage brainwash, as depicted in Josie and the Pussycats. I was trying to suffocate the reader in the way that the characters are suffocated by it and allured by it. They have this masochistic relationship with it: I hate MTV, yet I can’t stop looking at it. I have no idea what’s going on. And that’s the monoculture stuff… In the Tumblr era, starting the book at 18, 19, [I wondered], Why are we all fascinated by Virgin Suicides screenshots with Kirsten Dunst, or Why do we think life was better when we could go see The Matrix at the movies? I was really curious to explore all of that. 

B: You’re well versed in the realm of magick—you even wrote a book about it. Lusif is clearly interested in the occult. I’m curious about how your own experience with the occult informed the way that you wrote Lusif. 

ALEX: I probably shouldn’t say this, but I had a kind of friendship with Marilyn Manson starting in 2015 when he posted my Snapchat movie for the first time. I took things that he said to me in emails or texts and added them to the dialogue of Lusif to really immortalize his energy into it. About what you’re saying particularly… rather than my own experiences, I more so studied the young girls I knew who would read The Satanic Bible and evoke entities and create chaos and destruction. I don’t know if you know this kind of e-girl aesthetic with the Baphomet head, that Hot Topic mall goth vibe… I definitely was more so inspired by stories from people around me. But also, Manson mentioned black magick and the Tetragrammaton and stuff in The Long Hard Road out of Hell, his biography, which was really big at the time. 

B: I’m curious to hear about the difference in response between Gen X readers and younger readers. Someone who grew up in the early 2000s probably doesn’t have to think twice about the cultural references—they’re like, Oh yeah, I remember this. But for a younger reader, the references create a more interactive experience. When I got to the scene where Lusif is talking to this girl and he’s like, “Come on, I know you liked that chapter where Marilyn Manson is torturing people in his autobiography,” I had to stop and look up the autobiography on Internet Archive and read that chapter.

ALEX: That’s so cool! I love that! Did you not know about that? Isn’t that creepy?

I would love for New Millennium Boyz to be taught in a media studies historical lesson. It is interesting what the reactions… There are people who were seniors in Y2K and then read it and they’re like, Oh my God. I remember people like this. It just takes them right back. It’s kind of interesting that you mention this, because I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’m like, Who did I really write this for? It must be overwhelming being a Zoomer and reading it and being like, This is all very foreign. It does create a different experience. I find that some Gen Z readers can look past all the pop culture references and still get to the point and figure it out. But other people are fascinated by them.

B: On the note of media studies, I was thinking about Marshall McLuhan’s concept of cool mediums and hot mediums while I was reading. I imagine the book comes across as more of a cool medium to most younger readers, because to break through the wall of some of the more obscure references, you have to engage more intimately with the text, which produces this more emotional relationship with it.

ALEX: Oh, for sure, for sure. I sometimes wonder if there are certain people who are making a list of songs in their phone, and then they’re gonna listen later on Spotify.

B: Mass culture obviously doesn’t exist the same way now as it did when the book was set. How do you think the way we consume content has affected our relationship with celebrity and with each other?

ALEX: It’s fractured everything. It’s fractured people. Obviously the pop culture of the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s, not all of it was high-tier art. But there was a monoculture where you could pinpoint what a cultural moment was and how it connected to people. Losing that created algorithmic craters and that created a sense of disconnect. On your phone, you might have a Twitch streamer that you watch every day and I have no idea who they are. And on my phone, I might watch some conservative pundit and you have no idea who they are. And there’s this separation of realities and no pop culture that brings us together. I think the only type of monoculture left is sports, and I think that’s why Taylor [Swift] wanted to dominate that arena, because that’s the only time where it’s like, everyone watches, everyone’s connected amongst that. The loss of that is a lack of cultural camaraderie. What I really tried to go to bat to tell the reader is that Xennials—the Gen X/Y cusp—they built their camaraderie and social resonance and human connection off pop culture. Hey, do you like Daria? Do you like that band? And of course people still do that today, but there’s something different about it because there’s not an arena that everyone is tuned into. And that makes it difficult for artists and filmmakers to “break out.” Remember “breaking out”? The dream of… the infiltration of a culture? A band used to be able to go on MTV and sell, I don’t know, 30,000 records a month later. Lauren Conrad says the reason Laguna Beach blew up is because they aired the promos during the MTV Movie Awards. And that makes so much sense. If the teenage audience is already plugged in…

B: I feel like we’ve watched monoculture slowly fade away during our lifetimes. I have these vivid memories of being in elementary school and going to class after watching an episode of American Idol. Everyone would be like, “Who’s your favorite contestant?” “David Archuleta vs. David Cook?” If you go into a classroom of fifth graders now, that won’t be the case.

ALEX: For sure, for sure. And what ends up happening is the loss of the cable media and the magazine media is that it becomes such a nostalgic type of thing for Gen Z. Everything is kind of over, history is over, so it’s all about the aesthetic

I tried to satirize the reader while also showing sympathy for them. You know that Harmony Korine said on David Letterman, “Bacon is my aesthetic”?

B: I didn’t know that.

ALEX: [The word “aesthetic”] became a very buzzy thing in the Tumblr 2010s and on the Internet, so everyone was like, Why would you use that? I was like, No, Lusif would use that word. People did speak this way, but we didn’t have a log of everyone’s thoughts at the time. That’s why I compare Tumblr to the Y2K bedroom wall. 

B: You chose to set the book in the year 2000, but what if it hadn’t been? Do you think Brad and Lusif could exist today? Or rather, what would the 2023 version of Brad and Lusif look like?

ALEX: They would meet on Discord and have an anon Twitter page with Elliot Roger as the picture and be Tweeting edgy things and listening to Cumtown. It would definitely be different. I was very much trying to explore the root source of this great conversation amongst the Jordan Peterson set of human beings—the “grievance of real masculinity.” They really fetishize the Y2K era and the ’90s and the 2000s as this ultimate [era of] male, manspreading-type freedom. I was interested to show the reader that Brad is constantly inundated with Girls Gone Wild ads, and The Man Show, and things like Howard Stern, who famously said the Columbine killers should’ve raped the girls. I didn’t really realize it until a few days ago, but I built scenes or dialogue around references that I found in my research that were like keystones that I wanted to put in for a reason. 

B: How do you think your high school self would have responded to Brad and Lusif if you had all gone to the same school together?

ALEX: I would probably be friends with a Brad. I would be very fascinated by a Lusif, but also very scared. Possibly could go down Brad’s path, in a way. I got very seduced by darker people in my early 20s and teens. I could relate to this idea of trying to escape suburban claustrophobia and make myself real and experience danger, but it was very unconscious. Brad’s very conscious of it and is consciously alluding to how he produces this self-sabotage and there’s this element of self-awareness in it. 

I think it’s so funny that a lot of people grapple with how stylized the dialogue is. You have to remember that this is how teens would talk on the WB. They would say, like, a deep quip and it would be so articulate. That’s the fantasy that we’re selling. We know no one talks like this. That’s why we watch movies. That’s why we watch Gregg Araki movies. That’s why we do these things. We want that. What are we gonna do, just write the way that teens talk? That’s not fun. (Laughs)

The novel really elicits such extreme hatred and upset in people—or complete adoration. There’s no middle ground with this one. And maybe that was by design, but I’ve definitely struggled a bit with feelings of being misunderstood and I’m kind of annoyed about that.

B: How do you handle that feeling of being misunderstood? Do you have any insight for people who have written similarly controversial or easily misunderstood texts?

ALEX: It’s quite interesting. I got thrown into this idea of “transgressive literature.” There’s a lot of pretentious fucking people in those scenes. I was just telling the kind of story I wanted to tell and writing in the way I wanted to. And because we’re a post-Dennis Cooper, post-Chuck Palahniuk, post-Bret Easton Ellis society, I thought that I had the freedom to do these things. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I guess what I’m learning is that you really just have to believe in your own work and trust the people that you trust to… not affirm or validate what you’re doing because it’s really about internal validation, but…

It has been shocking the way the book has been taken out of context or completely misunderstood… Moving forward, I have to just remember what I love about writing and be fascinated and stay curious and all that type of stuff, and really try to keep my creative meter high. And with that comes a lot of reinforcing, a lot of discipline and routines and things like that.

B: Totally. You’ve spoken about how difficult it was to write some of the more disturbing scenes, like when Brad and Lusif bully the girl with Down syndrome. How do you prepare yourself mentally for those scenes? Do you have any insight for writers who have to push through troubling scenes or work with disturbing content?

ALEX: I honestly didn’t even really realize how dark of a shadow the book was on my life until I was free from it. I say you kind of have to just go through it and brace yourself… The problem that I have with being pigeonholed with other transgressive authors is that I’m not writing shock porn. I have a very methodical thesis about what I’m trying to depict. I’m not fetishizing the behavior of my characters or thinking, This is the dick size Olympics of the most shocking book you can write. I chose to have the scene with the girl with Down syndrome and the Super Soaker stuff because I was reading so many stories about fraternities that would do stuff like that. I was trying to depict a reality that you might read about in the news through fiction. I don’t know if there is any advice. You just have to trust that darker impulse or shadow to get through it. I took a lot of breaks. I had to breathe, I had to go for a walk. Definitely, it was quite disturbing. 

Have you seen Gregg Araki movies, by the way?

B: I love Gregg Araki. I was Amy from The Doom Generation for Halloween. 

ALEX: Oh, that’s so cool. Nowhere is obviously a looming character in the book. I discovered it when I was 18 and I watched it many times… I was thinking, Ok, we’re engulfed in this cinematic interpretation of Gregg Araki’s version of Y2K— but what is going on in the audience member of that era? How are they engaging with the work? That’s why there are so many homages to Gregg Araki in the book—I truly do believe that there would be people at that Y2K party who would know Nowhere. Cult classics have that hypnotic effect on people.

Is New Millennium Boyz a cult classic in the making? Given the way it hypnotized me, I’d bet on it.