Ed Adams - Tyrant - EPK insert

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EPK insert: Tyrant by Ed Adams review – satire for the age of collapse

Surveillance, loyalty scores, and the grotesque golden afterglow of post-truth power

[Review]

Imagine if Thomas Pynchon binge-watched Fox News, read TikTok comments at dawn, and reprogrammed Orwell for the attention economy. The result might resemble Tyrant, Ed Adams’s blistering, black-hearted novel of algorithmic empire and reputational freefall.

At the centre of this scorched satire is Richard Cardinal, a grotesque amalgam of failed businessman, populist avatar, and reality-televised pharaoh. Cardinal doesn’t govern so much as glitch — riding waves of grievance and gold-plated narcissism straight into the seat of power. Adams’s prose tracks him like a predator drone: clinical, close, and unsparing.

But Tyrant isn’t simply a character study in megalomania. It’s a systemic autopsy. We are walked through the architecture of collapse: loyalty-score apps rolling out without consent, Homeland Light checkpoints beside vape shops and bakeries, resistance movements hidden in fridge-lock errors and QR codes etched into tungsten. It’s all terribly funny until it’s not. And that’s Adams’s true skill — turning farce into fear with a sentence.

The structure mirrors its subject: fragmented, recursive, and spiralling. Chapters named for the Seven Deadly Sins alternate with confidential memos, podcast transcripts, hallucinated code drops. It’s not always linear — nor should it be. Tyrant understands that tyranny in the digital age isn’t a straight line. It’s a loop. A feed. A meme you can’t unsee.

Characters like Azaria, the shadowy strategist, and Zane Parallax, a tech-bro with messiah delusions, hint at deeper conspiracies but resist cliché. Even Vescovi — a Kremlin-adjacent operator with the soul of a faded spymaster — reads like Le Carré’s Smiley reincarnated inside a VPN.

Some readers may tire of the novel’s relentless tone — sardonic, caustic, at times overwhelming. But perhaps that’s the point. Tyrant isn’t here to reassure. It’s here to remind us what happens when power is hollowed out, and all that’s left is optics, loyalty algorithms, and golden thrones made of plywood and lies.

Verdict:

A searing, brilliantly destabilised portrait of late-stage politics. If Orwell warned us, Adams dares to laugh as the sirens sound.