Review by Frank Plowright

Luke Indiana once played the lead character in a long-running SF show, which means that although he’s no longer being offered acting roles, there’s always the convention circuit available to fill his ego and his pockets. Never mind that covid is sweeping the world.

Alex De Campi spends the first third of Parasocial making sure we see what a self-entitled sham of man her leading character is. It’s to ensure there’s very little sympathy when he comes a cropper at the hands of a crazed fan. There’s likely to be a feeling they deserve each other, and despite Indiana being forced into a position of having to reveal some actual truths, he never transcends caricature.

Stephen King’s Misery is the benchmark in the field of celebrities confined by obsessive fans, and De Campi doesn’t deviate far enough from that idea. The outright horror is absent, replaced by the humour of Luke’s ego, and there’s a larger injection of fan culture as his abductor imagines idealistic scenes, either as sections of fan fiction or cinematically. Erica Henderson has an impressive adaptability in modifying her style to accommodate these flights of fantasy visually, and in the post-story material she discusses the way colour and levels of brightness impact as events become progressively darker.

Following Henderson, De Campi offers her thoughts on fan culture, comics and celebrity obsession, noting the prominent contribution of social media, which is well used within Parasocial. Ultimately, though, it’s a slim story with a few nice moments, but not unique enough to stand out in a very crowded market.