Kerry Howley, you had me the title.

Maybe your brain hasn’t been colonized but internet worms for the better part of three decades, but I for one recognized immediately the reference to a viral video from 2014 in which a middle-aged white woman presents a practiced two-minute spiel, including visual aids, breaking down all the alleged satanic symbolism on a can of Monster Energy drink. Near the end of the video, she points to a cross shape on the label, says, “What is witchcraft? When the cross goes upside down,” and tips the can as if to drink it. Her mic drop: “Bottom’s up, and the devil laughs.”

But this isn’t a book about internet memes. In fact, most of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State (Alfred A. Knopf) focuses on Reality Winner, the NSA whistleblower who in 2018, at the age of 25, was given the longest sentence ever handed down for a violation of the Espionage Act — five years and three months — after leaking an intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which inadvertently (and, in Howley’s well-argued opinion, negligently and disastrously) revealed their source to the NSA while trying to validate the report Winner mailed to them.

So why not call the book Winner, the title of a biopic currently in production in Canada with a screenplay penned by Howley? (Reality, an HBO docu-drama depicting Winner’s initial interrogation by FBI agents, starring Sydney Sweeney, was released in May. If that stark reenactment left you wanting for some context and commentary, I’d highly recommend Bottoms Up.)

Perhaps because this book is less about Winner and her remarkable name than about the United States in the 21st century — specifically, how the world’s largest shadow government has used and abused tools of surveillance since 9/11; how ultimately, tragically human both the operators and targets of surveillance are; and how a nation that pins the health of its “way of life” on its ability to secure an ever-expanding, impossibly large hoard of classified data (everything from your cringiest Google searches to CIA torture reports) is doomed to be undone by its own disgruntled bureaucrats. Howley also doesn’t miss the dark humor in these stranger-than-fiction scenarios.

“The greatest danger to the national security state was now ideological, morally serious twentysomethings finding themselves as they sifted through secrets their younger selves had promised to keep,” she writes, reflecting on the government’s response to leaks made by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner.

Howley is a rather detached and omniscient storyteller, employing both investigative journalism, well-deployed anecdotes and crack insights. “Surveillance is made of us,” she reiterates throughout the text, along with, “To study surveillance is to learn, over and over, that we cannot escape ourselves.”

But her narrative is not without pathos; in fact, Howley has an uncanny knack for humanizing figures Americans have been conditioned to dismiss as evil, ignorant traitors. She embraces the contradictions represented by people like Winner, John Lindh, John Kiriakou, Julian Assange and Joe Biggs, while directing her red-hot laser pointer at the fatal fallacies in the United States’ approach to intelligence and national security.

“‘We kill people based on metadata’ a CIA director once said, which is true, and they are often the wrong people.”

So why label her book with a silly line from a viral video? I’ll let readers discover the connection for themselves, but suffice to say Howley doesn’t forget to address the new satanic panic that has infected online and real-life political discourse, and played a role in the rise of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon, the Proud Boys and the Stop the Steal movement.

“One could not trust the government undermined by Snowden and Assange and one could not trust the media that credulously repeated that government’s lies,” she writes. “The principle in which one could believe was giving offense, in that giving offense suggests a willingness to make a sacrifice — that of personal comfort — for truth.”

In her acknowledgements, Howley thanks fellow University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing professor John D’Agata “for bringing me to Iowa, where a certain melancholic quiet made writing possible.” If this state helped inspire such an innovative, important book, I can’t help but be a little proud — and a little melancholic.

This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2023 issue.