Oct 6

Oct 6 Book Review : David Simmons - Eradicator (2025)

It’s easy to call new things meaningless when you don’t want to do the work of figuring out what their meaning actually is. That’s been the engine of generational conflict since the first kid turned up the volume on rock n’ roll and their parents thought it sounded like car parts in a blender. The problem is: the things once dismissed as empty inevitably get canonized on a long enough time frame: Led Zeppelin, Super Mario, Mean Girls. You get my point.

The stuff that really is meaningless never gets that chance. It just holds your attention for an hour, maybe a week, then disappears without leaving even a dent. This sounds abstract until you realize it’s not. You live it every day. Art becomes content. Content becomes shorter, faster, emptier. First it fills the hours, then the days, and eventually the people.

David Simmons , author of the Ghosts of Baltimore novels , dives straight into this hollowing-out process with Eradicator, a novel that treats meaninglessness not as an aesthetic problem but as a horror story.

Eradicator follows Jada, a child passenger safety technician at a Baltimore hospital who’s growing tense, brittle, and dangerously unsatisfied with her life. She binges on pop culture like junk food, trades bodies the way most people trade playlists, and slowly realizes something dark is leaking out of her. It seeps into her relationships, some of which might’ve deserved poisoning, others that definitely didn’t. The collateral damage is almost beside the point.

What Simmons captures is the transformation itself: the way ordinary overstimulation and casual emptiness can literally mutate into something monstrous.

There’s Something About Jada

In Eradicator, Jada is constantly searching for meaning in a world that refuses to echo anything back. Maybe she’s looking in the wrong places, but that doesn’t make her struggle any less relatable. She tries to bond with co-workers by swapping weird anecdotes and unsettling urban legends — including a jaw-dropper about Kevin Costner allegedly sleeping with Cal Ripken’s wife, which is the kind of story that says more about American myth-making than baseball.

She binge-reflects on the TikTok clips and television shows she devours, hoping for some kind of revelation, but every cultural breadcrumb leads her back to the same carnival ride of disposable hookups and empty mornings around the coffee machine at work. The tension isn’t just that Jada feels hollow; it’s that she keeps trying to fill the hollow with things designed to evaporate.

Simmons never really explains why Jada starts killing and that’s the point. It feels less like a decision than an evolutionary step , the way hunger becomes starvation becomes murderous violence if nothing else is on the table. She’s craving something her reality can’t give her, so she decides to cut straight through it. The easy comparison is Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho, but Jada isn’t Patrick Bateman in drag.

Bateman obsesses over unreality , surfaces, masks, the existential joke of being a walking J. Crew catalog. Jada’s problem is the opposite. She’s obsessed with what’s real and comes up empty. When she finally finds it, it’s blood and rupture and bodies, and by then it’s too late to rewind to the safety of comfortable nothingness.

What Echoes Beneath

One of Simmons’ sharpest tricks is how Jada exposes the hollowness of everyone around her. Her co-worker Phil is the kind of guy who only sees people as their job titles. ùto him, Jada isn’t a person so much as “the child passenger safety tech,” which is basically like being human wallpaper. Her title is a condemnation. That’s who he wants her to be (he’s one of these vulnerable misogynists) and Jada’s constant drawing outside the line makes him uneasy enough to run off to HR at every chance he gets.

Then there’s Arlington Fawole, the HR rep Simmons mercilessly takes apart. He’s a man who confuses confidence for wisdom and leans on his authority and heritage the way other people lean on ergonomic chairs: as a substitute for actual substance. Jada sees straight through the unreality he projects, and in doing so, she destabilizes his entire professional hold over her. These supporting characters aren’t just foils; they’re case studies in how fragile "norma" looks once someone stops agreeing to the terms of the illusion.

Anyone reading this had intrusive thoughts of violence at some point or another in their lives and in Eradicator, David Simmons interrogates where they come from. His answer is as brutal and discordant as it comes.

Eradicator is another original and unsettling entry in David Simmons’ growing body of work, but Jada might be his most dangerous creation yet. She feels volatile in a way that’s hard to pin down , her words and her actions are slightly out of sync, like a song you can’t tell is off-beat or genius. Simmons wears his influences openly, but his voice is unmistakably his own: jagged, idiosyncratic, and obsessed with the menace hiding in ordinary conversation.

Few writers can make small talk feel like a credible death threat. Simmons can, and that’s why he’s not just promising, he’s inevitable. His name is not on everyone’s lips yet, but here’s on his way there.