Thinking of trading your mortgage for a converted Mercedes Sprinter and a portable espresso maker? You might want to hold off on listing the flat just yet.
If Instagram algorithms and curated lifestyle reels are to be believed, packing your life into four wheels, cruising off into the sunset, and posing casually by a cliffside campfire is the ultimate modern triumph. But as author Brian Asman exemplifies in his latest desert-set shocker novel, #VANDEATH, the aspirational dream of off-grid freedom has a nasty habit of swiftly spiralling into a desolate death trap.
Following the success of Man, F*ck This House (And Other Disasters), Asman’s new novel centers on Morgan and Jasper: the golden couple of social media. Beautiful, perpetually mobile, and adored by a million digital voyeurs, they appear to have conquered the rat race. Behind the pristine filters, though, the reality is far uglier: their relationship is falling apart at the seams, their finances are in ruin, and their online followers are teetering from admiration into dark obsession.
When a secluded trip into the unforgiving terrain of Death Valley turns all kinds of awry, the illusion collapses entirely. Harried by a mysterious black van and a masked killer with miles of desert in every direction, the pair find themselves locked in a violent struggle for survival—where the performative romance they’ve been touting to their band of followers faces its ultimate, brutal reckoning.
In celebration of the book releasing today, we spoke to Asman about the fragile boundary between authenticity and performance, the compromises inherent in making your lifestyle your livelihood, and the central, absurd paradox of #VanLife: the obsession with vanishing off the grid, while ensuring a million glowing screens follow your disappearance into the dust.