Substack Summer: VICTIM

Victim by Andrew Boryga

This is part of Substack Summer for Summer 2025. You can read more about Substack Summer here.

It's a Substack Summer (Reading List)!

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Substack Summer Overview

• Just the Facts - all the basic info about the book/novel/story

• Pump the Tires¹ - this is my bias disclaimer where I lay out what relationship I have, if any, with the Substack writer whose work I’m discussing. It works on a 1-4 scale; 1 being I barely know this person and 4 being you cannot trust a word I say.

• Overview - this is my “review” of the work in question, including any:

  • Stick-taps - positive aspects I really enjoyed

  • Chirps - anything about the work that didn’t work for me

• Overtime - miscellaneous thoughts and an update on the overall progress of the Substack Summer project.

Previous Entries:

1. Cubafruit by Alexander Sorondo

2. The Wayback Machine by Daniel Falatko

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Just the Facts

Featuring a cameo by my infamous blue tabs of DOOM

Title: Victim
Author:

Andrew Boryga

Format: eBook. Paperback. Audiobook. (Read via paperback, audiobook)
Genre: Lit-Fic with Satire elements
Substack:

Dwell by Andrew Boryga

Length: 273 paper-pages.

Vinny’s Blurb: Javi’s a hustler, but only as ambitious as a surface-level amount of work will take him. So, when he finds a cheat-code in the weaponization of victimhood and “woke”-speak, he uses it to change his life’s trajectory. Victim challenges established notions around victimhood, language, discourse, rhetoric, and how the language and posture of (white) allyship is a sword that can cut both ways.

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Pump the Tires

🫥⚫⚫⚫ 1/4

I’ve shared a handful of messages with Andrew via Notes, and he recently because a subscriber, but I had Victim on my TBR before the idea of Substack Summer even came to fruition, so I’m going into this one relatively unbiased.

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Overview

Javi — our titular Victim — is one of my favorite literary characters this year. I love me an unreliable narrator and pulling it off successfully is like watching a great magic trick. The mark (reader) is in on the con to a point, but they still miss the sleight of hand, get caught in the misdirection and story, and then… viola. Boryga’s Javi tells the reader that he’s a liar. He says when he’s lying or stretching the truth or fabricating details for his tale, which makes you feel like you’re on-the-ins with him. I lie to them, but I wouldn’t lie to you, dear reader. My confidant.

But can you trust a liar? Can you trust a character who has told you everything you know about them? Ask that question to yourself when you read some of Javi’s journalistic embellishments that can’t be corroborated.

Much like Cubafruit and The Wayback Machine, Victim is obsessed with narratives and who gets to tell what stories. This is something that

Alexander Sorondo

pointed out as well. Where Boryga flips the script is in having Javi tell stories that are false, but they are the lies that YOU (ostensibly) want to hear. It’s an indictment of performative white allyship; aren’t you just more comfortable when the brown man is the victim? Doesn’t that fit nicely into your worldview? I mean, what is fiction after all if not a “higher truth,” truer than facts? How far are you willing to go along without questioning?

Javi is good at playing the victim, professionally and personally, and also meta-textually, which is where Boryga’s real brilliance shines in this novel. The ending is so simple, but so. fucking. good. It gave that same suckered in feeling that comes after a well-done “is this your card?”

Stick-taps

• The structure of this novel is tremendous. The last page alone transforms your perspective of everything that came before it, and while it wraps up the story it also reopens every question throughout the novel for reinterpretation.

• The number of times during my reading when I said things like “Javi!” or “Oh, Javi…” or “JAVI NO!” was embarrassingly high. It not only made the novel engrossing by making me feel like I was friends with the narrator/protagonist but it made the ending that more impactful.

• I could see this book being co-opted by bad actors to advance a certain anti-woke narrative, but I think the perspective that Boryga shows is a lot more nuanced than the usual woke v. anti-woke dichotomy that’s usually presented. The fact that it dances in that grey area is what makes the novel so interesting and impactful.

• Some killer lines:

  • “He wrapped my hands around the handle [of the machete] just like dads on the Disney Channel did when they taught their kid how to hold a bat.”

  • “The instinct then was not to “stan” the things you loved… It was to tear them down.”

  • “Fisher-Price Lou Reed-isms”

  • “Perhaps they had been making an enemy of their future all along?”

Chirps

• Here’s the thing, the stuff I was gonna chirp is all stuff I’m second-guessing after the ending. Would so-and-so really do this, etc. Because Javi is an unreliable narrator it casts doubt on the verisimilitude of the story he’s told. So, when a character zigs when I think they would zag, is that incongruence or am I being purposefully misled? Curse you and your nuance, Boryga! I had to move one of my “chirps” into the “stick-taps” section.

• The one knock I will make is that I didn’t come across one of those lines where the author just straight up knocks you on their ass. But I don’t think that was Boryga’s intent. Victim wins the fight on points and technique, not with a flashy knockout. The prose isn’t trying to dazzle, but the way the story’s told does.

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Overtime

This was a five-star read for me, as you might from gleaned from my lack of critiques. Every character is believable with believable motivations, and even when they start to move toward a stereotype or a caricature (e.g. literally every white person in this novel), there is a reminder that this is the protagonist’s story… and he proves throughout that he is a master of manipulating stories.

One of the themes I’ve come across in the novels I’ve read this summer is: what questions are they asking; which ones are they answering; and which ones are they leaving open-ended? Victim is an absolute feast for people who love a thought-provoking read.

1. If you are unfamiliar with this phrase, watch the first ten seconds on this video.