I Reviewed (the Free Sample of) MrBeast’s Book to Win 2 $5 a Month Paid Subscriptions

One reviewer.

One free sample.

The ultimate challenge.

The ultimate prize.

James Patterson approaches novels like Henry Ford approached cars. Quantity, in other words, matters more than quality.

Patterson has written or co-written more than 200 novels since his debut in 1976. The extent to which he writes the books, though, is questionable. “When it comes to writing,” a Wall Street Journal interview explained in 2012:

… he has a well-practiced system: he writes a detailed outline and then hires someone—often a former colleague from his advertising days—to write the ensuing scenes, usually in 30 to 40 page chunks. He will review those pages every few weeks, sometimes providing notes on them and other times re-writing them entirely.

There are two things I’ll say for Patterson. The first is that I’m sure he works hard. So does any good industrialist. The second is that I haven’t read any of his books and they might be entertaining. I’m sure there’s a reason people buy them by the million — just like people bought Henry Ford’s automobiles. But some of us have a sneaking sense that writing, and reading, should be a bit less of an industrial exercise.

MrBeast, meanwhile, is perhaps the most famous YouTuber in the world. The blank-eyed, bearded social media titan makes mega-popular videos in which people are put through various bizarre challenges to win large amounts of money. MrBeast is eerily — though admirably honestly — attentive to how to brand videos to gain more views and, thus, more money. The man thinks about algorithms more than parents think about their kids.

MrBeast’s popularity has allowed him to release various inane tie-in products like a mobile game and children’s snacks. Finally, at the bottom of the merchandising barrel, he has discovered books. “Growing up I thought books were boring,” he writes:

… in reality I just didn’t read anything that actually interested me. Which is why I teamed up with James Patterson to write The Most Dangerous Games!

Yes, all books were uninteresting until MrBeast came along to save literature.

It’s no surprise that MrBeast thinks The Most Dangerous Games is interesting because he’s a character in the book. In this thriller, MrBeast is recruiting high-skilled, life-hardened people from around the world to take on hair-raising challenges to earn the chance to win a billion dollars and, somehow, save the human race.

“Hey, guys,” begins the invitational letter that opens the book:

It’s me, Jimmy. MrBeast. This is me. For real.

Okay, first off: as we soon learn, MrBeast is writing to people who “didn’t apply to anything”. He’s writing to military veterans and martial artists. What I’m getting at is that while, yes, MrBeast is very famous, it’s pretty damn arrogant to think that everyone will be impressed that “MrBeast” is writing to them. Why should a British ex-Marine or a Chilean jiu-jitsu master not just assume that he’s a dangerous lunatic?

MrBeast is collecting people, we learn, for a series of challenges that will “find someone who can move the world”:

We’ve all seen what happens when one person starts something real. A creator. An athlete. A kid with a phone. A nurse. A teacher. One voice catches fire. Millions lean in. And when those people move together, the impossible stops being impossible.

Actually, I haven’t seen that. Listing random jobs isn’t making it any truer. You can add “accountant” and “garbage man” if you like. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

Soon, our contestants have been collected — or at least the ones who weren’t smart enough to think that they were being addressed by a lunatic — and we’re in Antarctica with Alek — a 22-year-old who is “a survivor of the many wars that have chewed up her corner of the Carpathian Belt”. What does “her corner of the Carpathian Belt” mean? Serbia? There hasn’t been a war there since Alek was a twinkle in her father’s eye. Was naming a specific war just too liable to alienate some small fraction of the paying audience?

Okay, perhaps the book is set in the future. Perhaps it later gets explained that “the Carpathian Belt” is some kind of new war-torn state. But it’s hard to be generous about the plotting of a book where the authors have so little trust for their readers’ attention span that the chapters seem to be about a hundred words long. The exposition, meanwhile, is delivered with all the subtlety of wet fart in a library. Alek has protective feelings for the younger, smaller Hannah. Then we meet Jack who … has protective feelings for the young, smaller Rupert.

You get the point. I’m not going to squeeze more dollars into the bulbous bank accounts of MrBeast and James Patterson and I think I’ve made my point. The book is a half-baked attempt to MrBeasterise the thriller genre, with precisely the results you would expect.

Allegedly, the book is not performing well. I suspect its sales won’t be as disastrous as initial projections are suggesting — because it’s just hard to gauge initial sales, and because Mr B and Mr P have absolutely massive audience — but it isn’t really a surprise that kids who have been trained to be hyper-stimulated every second of their entertainment experience might not be keen to sit down and read a 480 page tome, even if the chapters are about ten words long.

I want to circle back to MrBeast’s promo. If he’d said “books are great, and I wanted to write one” I would have thought, well, it’s not for me but it’s not my business. The sheer brazen cynicism of implying that books was dull until he came along, though, is downright infuriating. I’ve never wanted to participate in a book burning more.

People talk a lot about “AI slop” these days, and not without just cause, but the fact is that human-created culture has been veering towards mass production, pastiche and opportunism without AI having to be involved. There are probably more egregious examples than MrBeast and Patterson, inasmuch as these two “creators” are pretty upfront about what they do, but the cynicism is still miserable. It’s not that I expect everything to be great art. I’ve watched more WWE than I’ve read Dante for God’s sake. But as offensive as the poor quality is the sterile character — the lack of personality. I mean, look at MrBeast and Patterson pretending to be excited about their book. I’ve seen people at funerals more excited by death.

This kind of thing isn’t just bad on its own terms. It has a corrosive effect on the soul. How else can we explain William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins — a home of Neal Stephenson and Elmore Leonard — accepting promotional materials like this. The laziness of the typo (“captial” indeed) is bad enough but the laziness of calling a generic newspaper World News is more offensive.

No one has to live like this. No one has to let their soul be MrBeasterised and James Pattersonated. On Amazon, there are people who haven’t read the book but are praising “the gold Mr.Beast logo on the cover” or lamenting “no access to bonus video”. It’s offensive not in the normal sense of transgressing against morality but in the deeper sense of transgressing against what human beings are.

You can see life as a challenge. A challenge to maintain your sense of integrity and your sense of aspiration in the face of everything that degrades and distorts it. The challenge? To keep your soul. The prize? You keep your soul.