The Wrath of Todd

Todd Noker is better known in the Utah Valley as “Todd Nuke ‘Em,” program director for KXRK, X-96. However, he is also a Weber State University alumnus and published novelist, having recently released his newest book, Blogs of Wrath, with co-author Zack D. Shutt.
“The book came, essentially, from Zack Shutt’s blog when he was in junior high school,” Noker said. “I would read the posts daily and Zack was going through some pretty rough stuff at the time. As I became hooked on it, I thought, ‘This would be a compelling way to tell a work of fiction: a novel in the form of a blog.’”
Blogs tells the story of Carl DeReese, a student in a new junior high school in Salt Lake City, through his regular blog posts.
“There’s a lot of stuff in there that either happened to me or is a variation of what happened to me or Todd,” Shutt said.
The two began writing the novel when Shutt was still in junior high and took experiences directly out of his blog as well as Noker’s middle school memories.
“I conjured up all the bad junior high memories I had from real life,” Noker said. “There are too many truthful things from my life in this book.”
The topics covered in Blogs span the gamut of teenage angst, from anger and violence to heartbreak and insecurities.
“It was hard to write and hard to read and edit,” Noker said. “When we did the revisions, there are sections of this book that deal with some direct stuff that was going on in my life that were just hard as hell for me to read.”
Initially, the book was released for free online and was met with positive response from the many who downloaded it.
“We wrote the book and then we didn’t know what to do with it,” Noker said. “I liked it, Zack liked it and then Zack showed it to a couple of his friends and they liked it, so the response was good. The book is essentially a blog, so we thought, what the hell, and we put it out as a PDF. We got a lot of downloads, a few hundred, a good amount.”
Many of those downloaders said they could relate to the various things Blogs talks about.
“It was really emotional for a lot of people that I just handed it to,” Shutt said. “They all came back saying the same thing. It’s an emotional book but it’s hopeful in the way that life always gets better. Junior high isn’t the end of the world, even though you’re not thinking that way at the time.”
Noker has two previously published books, Path of Totality and Rated F. This is Shutt’s first published novel.
“Zack wrote half of it, so I feel comfortable saying that to me, what he added to it is The Catcher in the Rye of his generation,” Noker said.
The heavy reality of the book is what Noker and Shutt hope will encourage people of all ages to read it.
“I’m sure teenagers are going to love it because it talks about the things they go through in their everyday life without adding vampires or wizards or any of that,” Noker said. “It’s real life. It’s like The Breakfast Club for the kids that were raised by the Internet.”