Dayna Lev is sitting in her car, stuck in LA traffic behind a moving truck containing all her possessions, when a friend sends her a link to a Reddit post clearly written by her boyfriend—and that’s how she discovers that he doesn’t really want her to move in. Oh, and she’s currently unemployed. She calls Craig Deckler, a former mentor, who offers her a job at his crumbling family home in the Loz Feliz hills. Dayna gives Craig’s address to the moving van and commits herself to overseeing social media content created by the young adults in what is now a hype house. Olivia Dahl from North Dakota, a newly orphaned 19-year-old, applies for a position at the house, and shows up with her bags and a crushing desire to find out what happened to a former resident—Becca Chambers, a tarot card reader—who mysteriously disappeared months earlier. The other residents include Morgan Bokelberg, makeup aficionado and stylist; Piper Bliss, who was kicked out of her first hype house, and her boyfriend, Sean Knight, who together focus on creating nonspeaking, dance-related couples content; and Jake Cho, who focuses on content designed to make middle-aged women feel cozy and loved. At the pinnacle of the house is Craig, whose family has owned the famous Deckler House for a century. His goal is to raise enough money to renovate the house so it can stay in the family. Author Stein adeptly captures the messiness and contradictions of being human and creating content, portraying the blurred lines between reality and online personas and the unhinged emotional toil that creating such content can take.
