Ned Vizzini's BE MORE CHILL a Coming of Age Novel in the Age of Sci-fi Technology

Ned Vizzin's young adult novel BE MORE CHILL ('04)is a coming of age novel dealing with the social hierarchies of high school while living in an age of omnipotent technology.  Vizzini (b Amer 1981-2013) was an accomplished screenwriter & author of young adult novels.  Sadly, he committed suicide at 32 having suffered from clinical depression.  His novel "It's Kind of a Funny Story" ('07) is about a 15 year old placed in an adult psychiatric ward.  Vizzini has said the story's main character Craig was based on his own experiences.  The novel received the Best Book Award for Y/A Fiction in '07.  In his earlier novel BE MORE CHILL, Jeremy is a high school student who keeps a running tab on all the indignities & snubs he receives daily.  Jeremy's only friend is Michael, another outsider from the inner realm of cool kids who rule at school.  Jeremy pines for beautiful Christine whose barely aware of his existence until he becomes bumptious & off-putting.  Jeremy would make a deal with Faust if only he could win Christine's affections.  Faust comes in the form of Rich, an alpha male at school.  Rich convinces Jeremy the answers to connecting with girls and for being cool comes in the form of a "SQUIP;" a pill you ingest.  Besides costing $600 & purchasing the SQUIP in the backroom of a Payless store, it would seem a bogus con job.  However, once Jeremy obtains the money in his own hilarious heist and ingests the SQUIP, his dreams start to come true by listening to the voice now speaking inside his brain instructing him how to behave.  The SQUIP is also capable of doing Jeremy's trig homework in minutes.  The amusing awkward angst of navigating teen pressures takes a disturbing leap into sci-fi satire with eerie credibility.  Jeremy is not hallucinating, he's overrun by the SQUIP embedded in his brain.  The advice seems to steer Jeremy on a fitness regime, a speed course for gaining cool status and for getting the girl of his dreams.  The dream becomes a nightmare for Jeremy & classmates alike.  Vizzini's present & futuristic apprehension that young people in general are so turned in to social media,  technology and celebrity lifestyles that their actual lives are become phantoms or feel too pressurized to seek perfection. BE MORE CHILL is comedic and chilling.  It captures the susceptibility to succumb to external pressures to where common sense is shed and the individual loses their own self-identity.