It’s time to check in: How was the year in books for you, dear reader? Now that we've approached the conclusion of 2024, it's time to reflect on the year's embarrassment of literary riches—and now we’re here to spread the gospel about our favourites.
The best books of the year took us to dazzling new frontiers. In the fiction landscape, a spate of new novels offered visions of humanity from unlikely narrators, including robots, aliens, and the undead. Meanwhile, it was an outstanding year for memoirs; new outings from luminaries grabbed us by the heartstrings and refused to let go. In the non-fiction space, some of our finest intellectuals released titles that helped us make sense of our changing world, from the culture-flattening force of algorithms to the future of work.
Here are the best books of 2024.
Lauded as “the first great incel novel,” Rejection opens with a bang: In the first of its several linked stories, titled “The Feminist,” an aggrieved young man details his youth spent “dragging his virginity like a body bag into his 20s.” In the brutal and brilliant character studies that follow, Tulathimutte paints scorching portraits of lonesome outcasts: a depressed woman spiralling over her unrequited crush, a start-up bro seeking his other half, a gay man going to shocking lengths to pursue his convoluted fetish, and more. Flayed open by the author’s scrutiny, these characters blister off the page, all of them electric in their rage, their alienation, their tragicomic grossness. Paired with a deft metafictional coda, their voices coalesce into a unified theory of rejection. Perverse, profane, and profound, Rejection will make your skin crawl.
Anna Williams-Bonner, the widow of the best-selling novelist at the center of The Plot, takes center stage in Korelitz’s enthralling chaser, The Sequel. After her husband’s supposed suicide, Anna enjoys collecting his royalty checks as a famous literary widow, but when she pens her own runaway best seller, trouble follows. Soon enough, she begins to receive mysterious excerpts from a novel she never expected to see again—a novel no one can know about. In a twisty-turny quest to contain her secrets, Anna hunts down her anonymous tormentor, but much to her frustration, the dead don’t want to stay buried. Much like The Plot before it, The Sequel revels in lambasting the literary ecosystem, but this time there’s a winking metafictional glee about sequels as a form. Through the narration of this unforgettable antiheroine, a deliciously nasty storyteller, Korelitz delivers a ripping good read.
Ten years after the conclusion of his Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer returns with a surprise fourth volume that puts the weird in “Weird Fiction,” to delightful effect. At once a prequel and a sequel, Absolution shades in some of the previous volumes’ dark corners, but rather than provide answers about Area X, a coastal wilderness colonised by something alien, it poses new questions. In Part One, set two decades before Area X’s formation, a team of government-funded biologists introduce alligators to Florida’s Forgotten Coast, with disastrous consequences; Part Two is a potboiler investigating the ongoing aftermath, still tormenting locals 18 years later. Part Three contains some of the liveliest writing in the series: Recounting the first expedition into Area X, it’s the story of Lowry, a foul-mouthed self-styled “hero” with his own ulterior motives. Surreal and Lovecraftian, packed with cascading cosmic horrors, Absolution shows a singular mind at work.
As we embrace new digital experiences, what embodied truths do we lose? That’s the aching question at the center of The Extinction of Experience, a roving investigation of the threat technology poses to our social and cultural norms. Rosen writes about the danger of “mediated” experiences curated by data-hoarding megacorporations—for example, we check the weather on our phones instead of stepping outside to sense the temperature. “In these new worlds, we are users, not individuals,” Rosen writes. “We are meant to prefer these engineered user experiences to human reality.” But don’t mistake this book for a hand-wringing polemic against change; rather, in each disappearing ritual, Rosen highlights the deeper loss to the human psyche, as in the connection she draws between the end of cursive writing instruction and a measurable loss to children’s cognitive skills. Rigorously researched and elegiacally told, The Extinction of Experience is a compelling reminder that “go touch grass” is more than just an Internet punchline—in fact, it’s a human imperative.
“You can’t give back what already belongs to someone,” writes Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle in this powerful history of land theft in Oklahoma, spanning more than 200 years of atrocities committed against the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole). Blending reportage and historical research into a propulsive narrative that reads like a legal thriller, Nagle traces the connections between key inflection points, from the Trail of Tears to a small-town murder on treaty lands. More than a century later, that murder would lead to McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that reaffirmed Indigenous rights to Oklahoma land. Through the checkered history of this one state, By the Fire We Carry tells a broader story about the ongoing fight for justice and tribal sovereignty among Indigenous Nations. Detailed and impassioned, it’s a gripping corrective to the historical record and not to be missed.
At 17, Ciment began a sexual relationship with her drawing teacher, who was 47 and married with two teenage children. In 1996, she published a memoir of their unconventional marriage called Half a Life; now, nearly 30 years later, the widowed author throws a stick of dynamite at that book. In her new memoir, Consent, Ciment reconsiders her love story, disassembling the careful mythologies she’s constructed around her early years. In Half a Life, she insisted that she initiated the first kiss; looking back decades later in the pages of Consent, she remembers how her husband pulled her into a kiss when she hung back after class to ask a question about careers in the arts. “Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later?” Ciment writes. “Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Unflinching and bravely told, this postmortem of a marriage is one of the gutsiest books of the #MeToo era.
Indiana Jones meets Star Wars meets Nietzsche in this thrilling galactic heist packed with existential thought. Kitasei’s nail-biting story centers on Maya Hoshimoto, once the galaxy’s most notorious art thief, who now lives a quiet life as an Ivy League archivist. When a dead explorer’s journal materialises at the archive—one that promises to lead her to “the grail,” an artifact with the power to open portals to other solar systems—Maya is forced out of retirement. But she isn’t the only one searching for the grail, and if it falls into the wrong hands, interstellar travel could become impossible. Maya’s quest across the stars is a space opera of the highest order, rich in breakneck pacing and memorable alien accomplices, but it’s in the quest for moral clarity that The Stardust Grail really soars. As Maya journeys from planet to planet, Kitasei offers a profound allegory about the dangers of colonisation, taking this rousing romp to the next dimension.
When 30-something Lauren returns to her London flat late at night, she finds her husband waiting at the door. There’s just one problem: When Lauren left the house, she was single. She quickly discovers that her attic is generating an endless supply of husbands; as soon as one goes up, another comes down, and her life re-forms around him. At first, Lauren wonders which husband she can live with for now as she seeks a suitable plus-one for an upcoming wedding; then, which husband she can live with forever; and ultimately, which version of her life and herself she can live with. In this warm, wise, and bittersweet debut, Gramazio delivers a moving meditation on the paradox of choice in modern dating (and modern life).
In Wayne’s latest novel, we see “the real winners of America” through the wide eyes of Conor O’Toole, a college athlete raised by working-class parents. Fresh out of law school, Conor decamps to coastal Massachusetts for a luxurious summer: In exchange for tennis lessons, he’ll receive free lodging on Cutter’s Neck, a gated oceanfront community for the grotesquely wealthy. But Conor has student loans to repay, so when a sharp-tongued divorcée offers to pay twice his hourly rate for more than just tennis lessons, he can’t help but acquiesce. Soon enough, he tumbles into an erotic affair that challenges everything he thought he understood about sex and power; meanwhile, he falls for a young writer. As Conor’s double life spins out of control, one horrifying mistake threatens to punish him for his trespasses among the elite. Gutsy and shocking, The Winner is a palm-sweating thrill ride through the lives of America’s winners and losers alike.
In a series of immersive reported vignettes, the Financial Times’s AI editor takes readers around the globe to investigate the technology’s damaging effects on “the global precariat.” In Amsterdam, she highlights a predictive-policing program that stigmatises children as likely criminals; in Kenya, she spotlights data workers lifted out of brutal poverty but still vulnerable to corporate exploitation; in Pittsburgh, she interviews UberEats couriers fighting back against the black-box algorithms that cheat them out of already-meagre wages. Yet there are also bright spots, particularly a chapter set in rural Indian villages where under-resourced doctors use AI-assisted apps as diagnostic aids in their fight against tuberculosis. Fair-minded but unsparing, Code Dependent is the most lucid reporting yet on a fast-growing human-rights crisis.
Just how much do algorithms control our lives—and what can we do about it? In this eye-opening investigation, Chayka enumerates the insidious ways that algorithms have flattened our culture and circumscribed our lives, from our online echo chambers to the design of our coffee shops. But all is not lost: Chayka argues for a more conscientious consumption of culture, encouraging us to seek out trusted curators, challenging material, and spirited conversations. After reading Filterworld, you’ll be ready to start your “algorithmic cleanse” and get back in touch with your humanity.
In 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Then, at age four, she’s “activated” by her extraterrestrial superiors 300,000 light years away on the dying planet Cricket Rice, who task her with reporting back about how humans think and behave. Through a fax machine in her bedroom, Adina transmits astute and often hilarious observations about the confounding behaviour of earthlings (for instance: “human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy”). Meanwhile, she experiences the bittersweetness of growing up; ostracised by the popular clique and mocked for her dark skin, she learns how, sometimes, being human means feeling alien. Warm, witty, and touching, Beautyland is an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging.
Set in 1895 at the border between Texas and Mexico, The Bullet Swallower centers on Antonio Sonoro, the scion of a moneyed but deplorable family living in Dorado, Mexico. After a train robbery gone wrong outside of Houston, a shoot-out with the Texas Rangers leaves Antonio’s brother dead and Antonio horrifically disfigured, earning him the nickname “El Tragabalas” (the Bullet Swallower). Antonio’s quest for revenge against the Rangers takes him through the heart of the Texas badlands, where he weighs his violent impulses against the opportunity for repentance. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative set in 1964, Antonio’s grandson Jaime, a Mexican movie star, transforms his grandfather’s story into a feature film, hoping to redeem the Sonoro name. Linking the two narratives is the mystical stranger Remedio, a reaper of souls guiding the Sonoros toward the light. Rich in lyrical language, gripping action, and enchanting magical realism, The Bullet Swallower augurs a bright future for the new frontier of westerns.
One of our finest practitioners of the short-story form delivers her debut novel at last—and what a novel it is! The Book of Love is a phantasmagoric door stopper rich in characteristically Link-ian pleasures, like the collision of the mundane and the magical. In a coastal New England town called Lovesend, four teenagers investigate how three of them died, only to be resurrected by their music teacher (to whom there’s more than meets the eye). Then Lovesend is transformed by magical happenings as the veil between this life and the afterlife is ripped away, leaving our young heroes desperate to hang on to the real world. Enchanting and immersive, The Book of Love is a landmark achievement from a writer who never stops surprising us.
Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working, a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. Assembled in a polyphonic oral history, Larson presents 101 conversations with American workers from all walks of life, including teachers, nurses, truck drivers, executives, dairy farmers, stay-at-home parents, wildland firefighters, funeral directors, and many more. In the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, Larson’s subjects share their struggles to make ends meet, reckon with economic upheaval, and locate meaning and purpose in their work. Presented together in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich portrait of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.
In her latest bravura memoir, Jamison chronicles a wrenching period of rupture and rebirth. When their daughter was 13 months old, Jamison and her husband separated; what followed was a brutal struggle to balance parenthood, work, dating, sobriety, and creative fulfilment, all while the pandemic loomed. Told in overlapping, ever-widening circles of thought, Splinters details Jamison’s struggle to inhabit the roles we ask of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend. At the same time, the book is an intimate tribute to the author’s rapturous love for her daughter. Splinters thrives in this messy, imperfect complexity—in “the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.” Honest, gutsy, and unflinching, Jamison scours herself clean here and finds exquisite, hard-won joy in the aftermath.
Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, Taffa situates her outstanding debut memoir in similar collisions of culture, land, and tradition. Here she recalls the people and places that raised her—especially her parents, who pushed her to idealise the American dream and assimilate through education. Taffa layers in diligent research about her mixed-race, mixed-tribe heritage, highlighting little-known Indigenous history and the shattering injustices of colonial oppression. Together the many strands of narrative coalesce to form a visceral story of family, survival, and belonging, flooding the field with cleansing light.
In 2019, Crosley suffered two keelhauling losses: First her apartment was burglarised and her jewelry stolen, then one month later her friend and mentor Russell Perrault took his own life. For Crosley, the two losses became braided together; “I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking,” she writes. In this raw and poignant memoir, divided into five sections that correspond to the five stages of grief, she links her frantic desire to recover the stolen jewelry with her inability to bring back Perrault. Leavened by Crosley’s characteristic gimlet wit, this excavation of grief, loss, and friendship leaves a lasting twinge.
In this stirring sequel to his breakout novel, There, There, Orange tells two linked stories: One centers on a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, Jude Star, who’s taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and forcibly stripped of his identity and culture. The other traces his modern-day descendants in Oakland, reeling after the powwow shooting that ended There, There. In this wrenching story about the legacy of colonial violence, we see generations of Indigenous characters orphaned from their past. Through poignant resonances between then and now, Orange delivers an epic saga of generational trauma, devastating to behold and impossible to put down.
Cunningham’s sensitive and sophisticated roman à clef centers on David, a 20-something Black man working in a minor fundraising role on an upstart senator’s presidential campaign. The author, who worked in the Obama White House, is clearly writing about an Obama analogue (this eloquent Black senator “project[s] an intimacy that was more astral than real”), but connecting the dots between fact and fiction is the least interesting reading of Great Expectations. As a young father and a college dropout, David struggles to relate to the privileged world of political palm greasing. As the campaign burns toward the White House, Cunningham spins a wise coming-of-age tale about power, idealism, and disillusionment.
In this provocative debut novel, Greer delivers a Frankenstein for the digital age. Sexbot Annie is the perfect girlfriend for her wealthy human owner, Doug. Programmed to please, she cooks, cleans, and adjusts her libido to Doug’s whims. But Annie is an “autodidactic” robot, meaning that she’s always learning and changing. As she experiences jealousy, secrecy, and loneliness, she becomes less perfect to the loathsome Doug and ultimately flees to meet her maker—with dangerous results. Annie’s painful journey of becoming is a poignant parable for the age of AI; it’s a rich text about power, autonomy, and what happens when our creations outgrow us.
James centers on a seminal character from American literature—and yet, seen afresh through Everett’s revelatory gaze, it’s as if we’re meeting him for the first time. Blasted clean of Mark Twain’s characterisation from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enslaved runaway Jim emerges here as a man of great dignity, altruism, and intelligence. The novel opens in Hannibal, Missouri, where Jim teaches enslaved children to run their speech through a “slave filter” of “correct incorrect grammar,” designed to pacify white people. Then the story settles into Twain’s familiar grooves—on the run together, Jim and Huck raft down the Mississippi River, facing danger, separation, and charlatans aplenty. Along the way, Jim imagines verbal sparring matches with dead philosophers, falls in love with reading, and begins to pen his own story: “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” he writes. And so he does. On the road to freeing himself and his family, Jim becomes more self-determined than ever. Clever, soulful, and full of righteous rage, his long-silenced voice resounds through this remarkable novel. Subversive and thrilling, James is destined to become a modern classic.
Originally published on Esquire US
I knew what to expect. Both of my parents had experienced retinal detachments, so I was terrified but prepared. The warning signs sounded vague: “Be wary of sudden bright flashes or arcs of light,” doctors told me. In reality, it was more like hot white blaster fire ricocheting off the hull of an Imperial light cruiser. “Be wary of any new ‘floaters,’ ” they said. When the floaters came, they were like black, stringy Dementors descending unexpectedly over my field of vision.
I’ve always seen the world through this perspective—everything filtered through what I watched, heard, read, and loved. But consuming pop culture like the world was ending when it actually was wasn’t so much fun. By December 2020, we had binged, read, spun enough. My wife and I decided to focus on our health, going on nightly mile-long walks around our Forest Hills neighbourhood, in Queens. One evening, the symptoms started in my left eye. We rushed to a retina specialist for outpatient laser eye surgery. Pew-pew-pew, and the hole was patched. Phew. More lasers in subsequent visits (both eyes, to be safe). My own up-close-and-personal Pink Floyd light-show experience, with encore performances.
Our newfound fixation on health was timely. A staph infection puckered my left calf like Freddy Krueger’s. Meanwhile, gummy bears were apparently killing me—prediabetes had matured into full-blown Wilford Brimley–style “diabeetus.” I was hitting middle age hard. I was no Wolverine; my healing ability was vastly inferior. While my body was failing, my mind was racing. The realisation that “life moves pretty fast” made me channel my inner John Hughes, as I attacked my decades-gestating manuscript like I was frantically writing a Ferris Bueller sequel.
And so, at 48 years old, I was finally able to see my pandemic project, my debut novel, published to great acclaim. No one was happier than my mother. Her da xinganbao (“big precious”) was finally a published author. I have always taken after her family: thick black hair, broad nose, the love of the written word. I was inspired by my grandfather, a famous Chinese reporter who sacrificed everything to immigrate to the US for journalistic integrity. He then spent much of his life caring for his fragile wife, my grandmother, who suffered from anxiety and a weak heart. So much of them was yi chuan, inherited by us. The noble talents, but also the poor eyesight, diabetes, and mental-health issues.
My mother had spent much of her time looking after the men in her life: shuttling my grandfather to appointments, working 12-hour days while her husband pursued his doctorate, raising her sons to do good. But now, like mine, her priorities were shifting: The pandemic presented an opportunity. My mother informed me that she had started writing, too. Or rather, she had resumed writing, tapping back into the collegiate aspirations she abandoned when she began her life here in the States.
And so, at 73 years old, Grace I-Yin Jeng was finally able to see her pandemic project, her first essays, accepted for publication in a Chinese journal.
Both of us were always inspired by my grandfather’s professional legacy, even more so after he passed. His final message years prior was one simple eternal character, ai (“love”), writ large in marker across the unfolded panels of a Chinese newspaper, left on the table of his hospital bed. As I wrote about such big ideas expressed through small moments, I wondered what my mother was writing about. Her childhood in Taiwan and the Philippines? Her early struggles in New York City as an entrepreneur? (She owned three shoe stores.) Having two teenagers and then a third miracle baby in her 40s, or helping thousands as a Social Security caseworker? Her response: “Thoughts on the season changing to autumn—and about you becoming a writer.” She still can’t help but focus on the men in her life.
What no one saw coming: my vision growing exponentially worse. In August 2023, as I was starting the final edits on my book, the lasers stopped working on my left eye. I would have to go under the knife. The vitrectomy would replace my eyeball juice with fresh-squeezed artificial replacement fluid, and a self-dissolving gas bubble would be injected to push my retina into place. A painless procedure (thanks, propofol and Valium!), but the following seven days of constant facedown positioning would be absolute torture. I was inverted and sore, and sleeping with my CPAP machine (like Hannibal Lecter in his face mask) was inhumane. Worse yet, in December 2023, I learned that my right eye required the same process. I immediately burst into tears.
Most people will get cataracts (the slow, natural decay of the lenses in their eyes) as they enter their 70s and 80s. But as a result of these surgeries, my eyes are undergoing vast changes until they stabilise. I am fast developing cataracts and losing my sight. (And no, my other senses aren’t heightened. Turns out I’m not Daredevil, either.) Each check-up fills me with dread. If the vitrectomy surgeries don’t hold, I may need further procedures to save my vision. If it’s only the cataracts I have to contend with, then hopefully within the year, my eyeballs will be “ripe” enough for this next round of routine surgery to replace my zombified lenses. Nothing makes you feel so old as looking forward to receiving the same treatment as octogenarians.
On the other hand, my mom is in great health, hopping on airplanes and cruise ships. On her last visit to Taipei, she got a blue whale tattoo. In honour of my dad, the marine biologist? “No deeper meaning,” she insists. “It’s cute and I like the ocean.” My mother, pleading with her sons to take her to see Bon Jovi. My mother, smoking weed for the first time. She’s been in her renaissance. But plans don’t always work out; her Cabo trip was curtailed when my father grew uncharacteristically pale and refused the buffet. He’s been dealing with his own health crisis ever since: leukemia. While we are slowly being attacked by our own bodies, she keeps us afloat, as per usual—sorting the pills for my dad, sending frozen dumplings to me. All done with grace, by Grace.
Nothing makes you feel so old as looking forward to receiving the same treatment as octogenarians.
Her “big baby,” tall and strong. But now I can no longer lift anything heavier than a half-full banker’s box for fear of putting pressure on these fragile eyes. What I fear, what I am most wary of now, is time—our mortal flesh fades fast, in spite of all we have left to do, say, and see.
Recently, my mother started letting her bob go grey. My temples, too, grow more into the same signature silver of that pliant genius Reed Richards. But I feel further from fantastic, as my limbs become increasingly stiff and achy every day. My eyes, too, miss out on so much wonder before them.
My mother has read my novel and is my biggest champion. Soon I will get to read her new work—in translation, sized up to a 24-point font. But there are still so many stories she hasn’t yet written. I am afraid to ask about them, to hear them spoken in this life or the next. But isn’t everything that’s inherited and passed down simply about ai—love—in the end? At my book events, I can make out her shape, beaming proudly from the front row, that familiar magnetic red phone case flapping wildly as she tries to record a video. What I experience now, however, is all blurry, hazy like a dream. I’m hoping once my vision is renewed, I’ll get to see this all again with her, for the first time and not the last.
Originally published on Esquire US
On 20 March, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing 13 people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies’ Home Journal–type magazine in which a reader described her husband’s psychological inability to return to his job at the transit authority after surviving the terrorist attack.
Murakami decided to interview survivors to examine the many traumatic effects of such a horrific event. The resulting book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, is an oral history in the vein of Studs Terkel. In one of the few moments that come from Murakami and not the victims, he inadvertently summarises one of the core themes of his fiction. Without the ego, he explains, we lose the “narrative” of our identities, which, for him, is vital for our ability to connect with others.
Of course, a narrative is a “story,” and “stories” are neither logic, nor ethics. It is a dream you continue to have. You might, in fact, not even be aware of it. But, just like breathing, you continue incessantly to see this dream. In this dream you are just an existence with two faces. You are at once corporeal and shadow. You are the “maker” of the narrator, and at the same time you are the “player” who experiences the narrative.
Translated by Matthew Carl Strecher
The inescapable duality of human consciousness—that is the terrain of much of Murakami’s fiction. What drew him to this work of reportage also animates his inventions. Murakami’s approach to consciousness is less representational than literal, with many of his characters literally being transported to a realm created by (or wholly inside of) their minds.
These places often appear underground, in inky darkness. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it’s a vast, cavernous world crawling with creatures called INKlings. The nether realm in Killing Commendatore is referred to as the Path of Metaphor, and the narrator finds the entrance with the help of two figures from a painting.
Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, features a library with a chilly office deep below the main building, where the narrator converses with the ghost of the previous librarian. And later, after the narrator merges with another character, they can only “meet” as separate people in a “small square room” inside his mind, lit with a single flickering flame. Wells, too, are a recurring motif.
In every instance, the existence of these impossible locations prompts bewilderment from the characters. The reader, too, is left just as confounded. How can a person go inside of himself? How are these characters travelling to these worlds? Are these other worlds real? Why are all these women vanishing all the time? And what’s with all the goddamn cats?
The world of Murakami is a land of mysteries, but perhaps the most pressing enigma has less to do with the meaning of any of his novels and more to do with the unlikeliness of his literary rise. Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami came of age in the complicated decades following the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His middle-class family, as John Wray put it, had a “vested interest in the national culture: his father was a teacher of Japanese literature, his grandfather a Buddhist monk.”
He grew up in Kobe, a port city teeming with American sailors, where he developed his love of Western popular culture: the eclectic forms of jazz, the unadorned minimalism of dime-store genre fiction, the romantic pop of Hollywood movies, the bright and splashy corporate iconography. In the late '60s, he left home to attend Waseda University in Tokyo, at the height of a tense period of student unrest.
In his book Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami characterises the expectations of men at the time and his own acceptance of those norms. “Most guys graduated from college,” he writes, “found work, and then, when things levelled off, got married.” He assumed the exact same future for himself: “It was the way of the world, after all. I had no intention to contravene (for better or for worse) what seemed to be the dictates of common sense.”
Instead, Murakami married young, ran a jazz café called Peter Cat for much of his '20s, dragged his (admittedly tired) heels before finally graduating after seven years, and accepted that “our futures, it seems, don’t always unfold the way we expect.”
For Murakami, this is an understatement. Consider the story of his transformation from jazz-café proprietor to experimental novelist. It began, as he tells it in Vocation, like this: In April 1978, Murakami attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. An American player named Dave Hilton hit a double into left field, and when the “satisfying crack” of Hilton’s bat arrived at Murakami’s ears, he thought to himself, apropos of nothing, I think I can write a novel.
And he was right.
Since that moment at the baseball game, Murakami has published 15 novels, five short-story collections, and five works of nonfiction, which have sold millions of copies, been translated in more than 50 languages, and won numerous major prizes. A cinematic adaptation of one of his short stories, “Drive My Car,” won Best International Film at the 2022 Academy Awards. His stories have also been adapted into a video game and in manga form. And ever since the publication of 1Q84 in English in 2011, there have been midnight parties held around the world to celebrate the release of new Murakami novels.
Mind you, this is an artist whose work, as John Updike put it, possesses “a bewildering overflow of possible meanings.” Steeped in Japanese symbolism, literary allusion, and American pop culture, his fiction isn’t exactly the stuff typical best-sellers are made of.
How, then, does a demure jazz-club owner become not only Japan’s perennial Nobel Prize contender but also a sensation the world over?
The most cited reason for Murakami’s global success is his writing style, which stands out in two major ways. First, he eschews some of the conventional elements of Japanese literature. His prose is hip, rhythmic, talky, unadorned, even disaffected. He employs informal pronouns not typically found in “serious” fiction. As an experimental stylist, he caused a bit of a stir when he arrived on the literary scene.
But it was more than just his inventiveness with his native language. Murakami scholar Matthew Carl Strecher describes what he’s alternately referred to as the author’s “nationality-less” style or his “translationese tone,” which he cites as reasons Murakami’s novels seem to work so well in other languages. But these are also backhanded ways of noting, as the Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe said outright, that even though Murakami writes in Japanese, “his writing is not really Japanese.”
To be sure, many of Murakami’s strongest influences came from outside his home country. For instance, he learned English reading American best-sellers, and he came to particularly admire Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, and J.D. Salinger, all of whom he eventually translated into Japanese.
When Murakami toiled over his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, he felt unsatisfied with his initial effort, so he pulled out a typewriter and rewrote it in English; at the time, he had only an elementary grasp of the language. Then he translated his simpler English sentences back into Japanese, cleaning them up as he did so.
This resulted in what Murakami calls “a rough, uncultivated kind of prose.” Combine this stripped-down approach with his irreverent syntax and pop-culture fixations and you’ve got what could be considered an anti-Japanese style. Certainly many of his critics thought so. And for the first fifteen years of his career, as Strecher points out, Murakami “preferred living in Europe, the Mediterranean, or America, anywhere but Japan.”
During the writing of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the mid-'90s, however, Murakami became newly committed to his home country. “I’m 45 years old, you know,” he told Strecher in October 1994, “and I can’t be a rebel all my life. I think right now may also be a turning point for me.”
No matter his geographical or philosophical loyalties, Murakami has always written about Japanese characters, often in Japanese settings. “I don’t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “I want to write about us.” Murakami does not read his books in their English translations despite his fluency, telling the writer Roland Kelts, “My books exist in their original Japanese. That’s what’s most important, because that’s how I wrote them.”
Despite their supposedly “nationality-less” affect, Murakami’s novels are not circumstantially Japanese but rather fundamentally so—at least in his interpretation of what that identity means. One thing he does share with his countrymen is kata, meaning “form,” which manifests itself most vividly in his narrative conclusions, such as they are.
Reviewing Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tim Parks notes that the trajectory for most of the writer’s protagonists involves them “returning, or preparing to return, to some more recognisably traditional community.” Parks continues, “For all the surreal adventure of the loner’s alternative world, it is the world we are familiar with that reassuringly reasserts its dominance. In that sense, these stories are perhaps less revolutionary than they might seem.”
Murakami’s global appeal, then, might exist in the heightened contrast between the unruly, traumatising, consciousness-splitting, ghost-filled world beyond and the comforting, drama-less certitude of the conventional life.
But the pleasures of Murakami aren’t all so high-minded—in fact, the author is beloved for his embrace of familiar tropes, some of which have become so charmingly ubiquitous as to inspire a comic strip called “Murakami Bingo.” Here, a non-exhaustive list of features you will probably find in a Murakami novel:
The story will oscillate between two unconnected narratives that ultimately bridge together. At least one of the narrators will be a single male who lives alone, because of either a recent breakup or a lifestyle not suited to romance. He will listen to and spend a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about classical music and jazz. At some point, he’ll have sex with a woman for whom he has affection but nothing more; perhaps she’s married. Somewhere in this (often unnamed) narrator’s life, there is a young girl (usually 16) who vanishes from his life, either mysteriously or tragically. He might search for her, a quest that takes him into strange underworlds. Some cats will be there, too, that’s for sure. One might get lost. And sometimes they’ll be able to talk. Other supernatural, mythological, and metaphorical beings—ghosts, unicorns, monsters, figures from paintings—abound. Characters with metonymic names like the Sheep Man, Johnnie Walker, and the Man with the White Subaru Forester menace the background. All of this is recounted with a matter-of-factness that belies the absurdity it’s often describing.
Murakami wields cultural references as literary devices as deftly as Quentin Tarantino. There’s the Proust’s madeleine-esque usage of a Beatles song in Norwegian Wood, instantly transporting the narrator in his memory to his youth. Murakami’s short story “Samsa in Love” reverses the famous transformation in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis so that the protagonist awakens “to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.” In the George Orwell–haunted IQ84, Janáček’s orchestral piece Sinfonietta is a catalyst for the character Aomame’s realisation that she’s in an alternate dimension. Art, for Murakami, makes the worlds go ’round.
Remember, the creator of these allusive and thorny and non-English works is a global sensation. The odds, it would appear, are stacked against Murakami and yet he thrives internationally. But perhaps it’s not as unlikely as it seems. In an email interview with Philip Gabriel, one of Murakami’s translators, I asked about the author’s ascent, and he said that those unlikely qualities—translated magical-realist fiction filled with unfamiliar symbology and ambiguous endings—“do not, I think, disqualify a writer from international acclaim. Quite the opposite.”
In the US, books in translation sell far fewer copies than those written in English, but many of the handful of foreign authors whose work is critically lauded and lives forever in backlists do, superficially at least, share many qualities with Murakami. For one, they often write with either a magical-realist or postmodern bent—think Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Olga Tokarczuk, Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, Han Kang, et al.
They also, as Murakami does, incorporate into their novels the cultural iconography and folklore of their native countries. Some would say this makes their writing somehow representative of their respective nationalities, while others might argue that our fascination with them is more about our tendency to exoticize foreign lands than it is about our desire to learn about them. Regardless, we have a surprising tolerance for the strange and the alien in our translated literature.
Gabriel also points out the historical circumstances that can occur to encourage Murakami’s popularity. For instance, the translator says, “As [Murakami] has noted himself, his work was surprisingly popular in East Europe in the early 1990s, when the collapse of the old Cold War regimes made people feel like the ground beneath them was unstable, as if the boundaries between real and unreal were blurred.” Sometimes someone else’s awareness of the strange and alien can be a source of reassurance.
While wholly true, these explanations alone don’t quite cover it. After all, there are plenty of writers the world over writing magical realism, and there are plenty of regions dealing with dark political ramifications. In unravelling the chain of events that led to Murakami becoming a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a global industry unto himself, it’s important to remember that such an occurrence requires the complicity and talents of translators, editors, and publishers. David Karashima’s Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami depicts the trajectory of transmogrifying Murakami’s magic into English.
In addition to the vital contributions from Murakami’s trio of translators—Gabriel, Alfred Birnbaum, and Jay Rubin—the person whom Karashima cites as particularly integral to Murakami’s ascension is Elmer Luke, a Chinese American editor at the Japanese publisher Kodansha International, whose role at the company was to help its books “break into the US market.”
Luke deftly oversaw the editing and promotion of Murakami’s 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase, generating no small amount of literary buzz in New York City with a series of events, interviews, book reviews, and appearances (especially a feat considering Murakami’s extreme reticence as a public figure).
He also gave Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The New Yorker, a copy of Murakami’s short story “TV People”—the first of many to be printed in the magazine, which was a real boon, personally and professionally, for an author hoping to find an English-speaking readership. Murakami himself gives Luke a lot of the credit: “Luke started the engine.”
When it comes to translating, there’s also the general predicament of doing the actual work, which, as Gabriel explained via email, is extremely nuanced. “Besides the usual challenging aspects of Japanese language you'd expect in any Japanese novel—differences between male and female speech, honorifics, onomatopoeia—Murakami seems to be always pushing himself as a writer, and you find new elements,” he said.
One such element is the unusual speech patterns of some of Murakami’s, let’s say, eccentric characters. “These are a challenge, for sure,” Gabriel told me. “I’ve read papers by linguists in Japan analysing the unusual speech patterns of, for instance, Nakata in Kafka on the Shore, and the Commendatore in Killing Commendatore. And what voice do you adopt for non-human characters, for talking cats in Kafka, and a very polite, talking monkey (“A Shinagawa Monkey”)?”
Gabriel, for his part, has one aim with his translations: “As far as maintaining a ‘Murakami voice’ in the translation, the goal is to convey, as honestly as you can, the voice you hear when you read the original.” Jay Rubin, another of Murakami’s translators, communicated a slightly different result to Roland Kelts, saying, “When you read Haruki Murakami, you’re reading me, at least 95 per cent of the time.”
This is not hubris on Rubin’s part but rather a quirk of linguistics, meaning that Murakami’s translators were just as crucial in creating the “Murakami voice” in the global scene as the author himself. Rubin recalls asking Murakami about the colour of a character’s glasses in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (“In one scene, a character had black-framed glasses. In another, the frames were brown.”) As Kelts writes in The New Yorker:
The Japanese language acquires much of its beauty and strength from indirectness—or what English-speakers call vagueness, obscurity, or implied meaning. Subjects are often left unmentioned in Japanese sentences, and onomatopoeia, with vernacular sounds suggesting meaning, is a virtue often difficult if not impossible to replicate in English. Alternatively, English is often lauded for its specificity. Henry James advised novelists to find the figure in the carpet, implying that details and accuracy were tantamount to literary expression. Is it possible that Japanese and English are two languages so far apart that translators can only reinvent their voices by creating entirely new works?
In order to “stand on a level playing field with other American authors,” Murakami writes in Vocation, he found his own translators, then brought the completed English version directly to publishers. He began this strategy after his agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban at ICM, told him that “she doesn’t deal in works she can’t read in English.” One cannot underemphasise Murakami’s business savvy, a characteristic not often shared by his fellow novelists.
By now his books have been translated into more than 50 languages—meaning that a large cadre of linguistic adventurers have joined the campaign to spread the gospel of jazz, cats, and other worlds.
They come out at night, it turns out, these Murakami people. As a capper on the end of two months spent embroiled in his disorienting realm, I attended a midnight release party for The City and Its Uncertain Walls in Columbus, Ohio. It happened at Prologue Bookshop, an independent bookstore with what is probably my favourite slogan for such an institution: “Never Skip the Prologue.”
At 10pm on Monday, 18 November, the place was packed. Dan Brewster, the owner, told me he was anxious about the turnout when he first scheduled the event but the response was so great that he had to fill his car with items from the store to make room for all the attendees. It’s no wonder. Prologue is a small boutique, so when it’s filled, it’s filled.
On a table sat Sapporo beers, hōjicha tea, and “Murakami muffins” (what exactly makes them Murakami, I’m not quite sure). Abbey Corcoran, one of Prologue’s booksellers, handed out Murakami totes full of swag: stickers, some Beatles-esque sunglasses, a party-hat-style unicorn horn, the aforementioned Murakami bingo cards, and a lovely pin. Caroline Angell, the assistant buyer, and Tara Ryan-Gallagher, the marketing and events manager, both expressed surprise at how many people were milling about their store.
Prologue closes at eight on weeknights, so there was an after-hours sense of fun to the whole evening. Dan emceed two rounds of trivia (which, save for a couple overly obscure questions, the audience completely slayed), then he randomly selected winners of some pretty nifty door prizes: One was a bottle of Japanese whisky, while another was a signed copy of the new novel.
Murakami has been publishing for almost half a century, yet the release of a new novel—not even a public appearance—can still pack a bookstore in central Ohio on a Monday night. That almost seems as far-fetched as anything from one of his novels.
What struck me most is the irrepressible sense of how normal everyone here is. Murakami, too, repeatedly insists that he’s a completely ordinary person, a totally regular guy. So do his protagonists. The narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls says when he’s a teenager that there isn’t much to say about his life or his “average, everyday kind of parents” who did “ordinary, run-of-the-mill” things.
Murakami sees these characters as long-lost twins: “And when I was two years old, one of us—the other one—was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven’t seen each other since.” His heroes, then, are himself if a few things had gone a different way. But they remain normal nonetheless.
This brings us back to the terrain of Murakami’s fiction: the duality of consciousness, the corporeal and the shadow. Normality can only be defined by what isn’t normal. Definitions require parameters. Murakami, in depicting such contrasts of fantasy and reality, places each idea in sharp relief.
And maybe this explains his literary prominence. Readers can journey along with his cavalcade of oddities, his sheep men, his unicorns, his magical towns surrounded by high walls, but they do so with the reassurance of a narrator (and a novelist) who emphasises that he is just like them.
They can witness the world in all its inexplicability, its unrepentant unfairness, its history of cruelty and trauma, and feel comfort in a protagonist who is just as overwhelmed by all of it. Perhaps, then, it is not Murakami’s strangeness that accounts for his success; maybe it’s the world’s.
Originally published on Esquire US
I've heard of this dude who rents himself out to do nothing. Most of us have, though we probably don't recall his name or what he looks like even after watching the documentary. The concept is so simple yet brilliant, inciting a reaction no different from looking at contemporary art we don't understand—I could've done that.
Yet, we didn't. And this man did. Morimoto has been hired over 4,000 times since the inception of his service in 2018. He gained 100,000 followers within the first year of advertising himself via a tweet. You're not alone in finding his success bizarre; the man himself was equally befuddled. Thus, his retrospective purposes to find an answer. So upon seeing his non-fiction title on stands, I wanted to get a glimpse into his mind. What I didn't expect, however, was the insights doing nothing could reveal.
Aligning with his mantra to "do nothing", Morimoto has actually not written the book himself. Engaging a writer and editor to keep an objective angle, all he did was respond to their questions and watch them develop it. Surprising, given his past life in academia and freelance writing.
Besides stemming from demoralising "jokes" his former employer made towards him, his take on jobs itself makes you reconsider the peculiar dynamics we have at work. Japan is infamous for its toxic corporate culture, but there are some aspects that apply to all modern offices. We are largely defined by our occupation, but our performances are often not judged solely based on competency. Rather, how personable we are as well. To the people who matter, at least.
It's more common than anticipated that people rent him purely to tell him something extremely confidential. Sensitive subjects you would share with their loved ones instead. Somehow, the degree of separation—Morimoto mostly sees his clients once—and his lack of advice fulfills seemingly basic human needs to A) voice it out, B) feel heard and not judged. As friend or family, we are inclined to help solve the problem at hand. Yet, many of his clients usually arrive at a solution without his contribution going beyond nodding.
In fact, it's more intriguing when it's not about getting a secret off your chest. Such as clients who just want to rave about their favourite band. It's fascinating breaking down why you can't necessarily do this with a friend. There are expected parameters for conversation; because veering too far from a mutual interest could potentially bore your companion.
This specialisation extends to activities as well. In his words, "When someone asks me to go with them to a restaurant, a computer game tournament or pop concert, I think that rather than having nobody at all they could ask, it's more a matter of not having a friend for that specific purpose. Unless a friend shares a particular interest, inviting them to come along might feel like asking a favour and thus puts you in their debt."
Occupying the liminal space between 'friend' and 'stranger', he liberates the client from these committal customs. Almost like a situationship minus the sex—you get the convenience of company without needing to spend the required time and expenditure to first build a friendship; and no obligations to continue contact. It begs the question: Are we as transactional in our personal relationships?
One of the biggest revelations was the fact that Morimoto does this for free. It is his strategic decision not to invoke a fee to avoid a dynamic dictated by money, where service satisfaction could become based on how "customers" can "get their money's worth". It's interesting to see how involving finances alters the levels of expectation.
Though living off his savings and only charging for travel expenses, he has received remuneration over the years. Sometimes, even for no reason at all. When asked how it compares with being a shrine offertory box, Morimoto is certain about the difference. People who throw coins usually expect a blessing; in his case, the sheer act of giving is what allows people to feel good about themselves. By merely existing as an available recipient, he has done his job.
What Morimoto calls being "zero spec", or having absolutely nothing to offer, is of itself his unique selling point. It prompted him to think: "A baby has a completely zero spec -it can't do anything by itself- but with the love and care of its parents and others, it lives. As I looked at our child, I kept thinking how wonderful that was. And I began to wish everyone could live like a baby does, behaving just as they wanted".
It is true that demands to contribute professionally and personally are ingrained later in life, and the freedom we were born with fades away. In some way, Morimoto has escaped this fate. It makes me wonder how many of us can.
One popular request and logical driver for his business model are activities you can't quite do alone. Or more likely, can't quite be seen doing alone. This leaves us with the questions: Why do we feel conscious of how people we don't know perceive us doing something alone? Or, what makes certain activities weird to be done alone in the first place?
Highly self-aware (probably because it was not directly authored) and funny in deadpan ways, the overall tone of the book is consistent with his branding. The short and easy read is ultimately not so much a book about doing nothing, but why humans need someone to do nothing with.
Rental Person Who Does Nothing
My process of composition is a long and sinuous one: first an idea comes to me, usually by serendipity. I can now allow the idea to incubate and grow into a fully formed piece—a novel or a short story. That period of incubation is often long, but when the story spills onto the page I am often satisfied because it has been a long time forming. But in 2011 when I completed the novel I had been writing since 2009, I felt that the narrative perspective was not right. It wasn’t a third-person narration; I had already tried that. It wasn’t a simple first-person narration; I had already tried that too. So what then? I left the book in frustration and began writing other things until I flew to Nigeria that summer. It had rained on my way to our house in Makurdi, but on arriving, the sun was shining and it had turned hot. I took a quick shower and lay in my old bed, now occupied by my younger brother Benjamin, who was nine at the time.
Benjamin had been waiting for me to come to the room so he could talk to me alone. He was taller than I had thought he would be—I hadn’t seen him in three years. He had a small scar on the side of his head, and even in the heat, he’d put the new cheap shirt I had bought him over the soap-worn one he was wearing. He was happy. He was talking, wanting to fill me in on the happenings since I was gone. Did I know that there have been changes in the neighbourhood? A new supermarket had been built just two blocks from our house—did I see it? I nodded, yawning. The family next door, who lived in the shack that formed this big contrast with our concrete, gated house, lost their dad last year—did I hear about it? I perhaps didn’t answer. I was tired from the 16 or so hours travel, falling asleep.
“Eh, brother, you know last week there was this boy, he was big. He was beating every-body, like a superman... but I fought him and beat him!”
These were words said in between some longer narrative, to which I was murmuring only mhmm, oh, while thinking of Cyprus from which I had just arrived, the friends left there, my apartment, and the new position the university was offering me. But now I was shaken awake. “There was even that new house with that blue roof. They have these two boys, twins. Ah, they can run really fast! That one, Ignatus—he can run. They are rabbits! And, they even go to that public school with many children... they are ants... they are all doves!”
A boy was a superman. Two boys are rabbits. Some schoolchildren are ants. Some adults are doves. These are not comparisons in the way I was used to, but associations. Benjamin, at only nine, did not have the ability to understand complex phenomena like violence, the absence of his older brother, marriage or things beyond his comprehension. So, he attempted to make sense of them through associations with thing she understood better—comics or animals (he owned an encyclopedia of animals that he treasured). This was why, when a boy bigger than him beat him, he could only explain this defeat as having fought with a “superman”. If kids can run so fast in the case of the twins, they must be “rabbits”. I knew at once that my younger brother’s childish babbling had opened a door that I had been banging at for many months. That night, I rewrote the entire novel, recasting the story of this fractured family through the lens of the youngest of four brothers, Benjamin, nine, who narrates the story by comparing everything to animals: “Father was an Eagle”; “Ikenna was a Python”; “Mother was a Falconer”; “Boja was Fungus”.
It was easier to make the choice on how to tell the story in the second novel. But later that year, I wrote a short story in which I faced a similar struggle. I had written it this time in the form it should be, but “The Strange Story of the World” lacked a narrative core. My father was visiting the US, and we were driving from Nebraska to Michigan. We had been in a debate about Christianity in Nigeria—my father defending the modern form, me arguing that it was corrupted and doing much harm. We stopped at a rest place and when we got back in the car, he wanted to change the subject. So, he began singing a song I hadn’t heard him sing in years, perhaps, in two decades. It was a song about hope being something that must be preserved. For some reason, this song—even though I hadn’t heard it in a long time—felt like the background music of my childhood, of my family story if it were to be made into a film. And as the cars stirred back to life, it occurred to me that the story of the family I was telling in the piece must revolve around a song.
We took a turn once this epiphany happened and I looked at my father, concluding his singing, and said to him, “Daddy, thank you for that!”
“What?” he said.
Years later, I began work on a new novel about the Biafran War of Independence. My mother was born in 1961, and only nine when the war ended. She knew that an uncle went to fight and never returned, and that one of her older brothers fought and survived. She knew about the hunger, the drills, the death she witnessed and heard about. At first, she wondered why that war, why was it a thing to be written about? She did not get it, I argued, plus it was too late. I had already finished what I believed was a complete draft.
We were sitting on the porch of her house in a town near Umuahia, and she was gazing at the sun shining through the palm trees, picking her teeth with a chewing stick. She sighed, looked at me and said, “OK, but there is something you should know about telling stories of wars.”
“What?” I said.
“Wars are meant to produce large-scale deaths,” she said in Igbo. “So, its primary subjects are often dead people, I fu go?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But, when stories of wars are told, they are told only by who? The living! Ha, but that is never complete. If the story of a war must be truly and fully told, it has to be told by both the living and the dead.”
My mother went quiet as my unwitting collaborators—my brother, father, and now mother—often did after unknowingly changing the shape of a project.
In the silence I could hear only bird cries. Two of them were floating just overhead on a thermal, the sun on their wings. I knew, watching them and with my mother’s words in my head, that the novel I had just finished would have to completely change.
Originally published on Esquire UK
There’s a long-standing theory that in times of real-world strife, readers lose their appetite for fictional horrors. That has never been true. The carnage of pulp magazines only gained popularity after the world wars, while Vietnam and the end of the hippie dream led directly to The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and the ascendency of Stephen King. And now our freshly unstable world is proving fertile ground for the growth of new budding nightmares.
So far, 2024 has been brimming with fantastic horror stories. I’ve done my absolute best to curate a list of the must-read titles released up to this point. The most promising element of the list below is in the breadth, depth, and variety of the darkness at play. Unlike previous “golden” eras of horror, there is no dominant trend. Rather, horror writers are digging their own grim tunnels into territory old and new. Retro haunted-house stories sit alongside extreme body horror. Whimsical horror comedies work in tandem with serious political subcurrents. Horror is not just responding to the perma-crisis we’re all living through; it’s providing respite and escape from it. Horror teaches as much as it terrifies. It heals as much as it hurts.
This list contains titles from the whole spectrum of the genre. There are stories to satisfy the most bloodthirsty tastes, and some that will lead the uneasy on their first forays into the shadowy end of the library. Stay with us, because we’ll be updating the list as the year continues.
Enjoy. It’s good to be scared.
In 2023’s Fever House, Keith Rosson brought the world to the edge of apocalypse. It’s a dense, punk-inflected pressure cooker of street violence, shady government shenanigans, and diabolical magic. The sequel, The Devil by Name, is both more of the same and something quite different. Following the broadcast of Fever House’s cursed audio file, the zombie-esque menace has spread beyond Portland. A reluctant group of survivors are pulled into a confrontation with a rogue government agent and a rising demonic power. Rosson continues to trace the spreading ripples generated by the first book’s cliff-hanger ending but replaces the tight, real-time focus with a nightmarish road trip across a broken America. It’s a bigger story, more relaxed and sprawling in the telling, but with the same unpredictable energy and flights of comic-book excess. My advice: Read this duology as one single grand, mutating epic.
Very early in Sacrificial Animals, there’s a scene that warns us Kailee Pedersen is not screwing around. The cruelty of a foxhunt reverberates throughout the novel, hanging over Nick and Joshua’s reluctant return to their Nebraska farm, where their father has called them to witness his dying. All of the tension between father and sons can be traced back to that early brutality, but Pedersen’s Gothic anti-pastoral is twisted further by the presence of Joshua’s wife, Emilia, whose Asian heritage allows a late injection of Chinese folklore into midwestern horrors. Pedersen draws on her own childhood as a Chinese adoptee growing up on a farm, and the authenticity shows. Restrained and ornate though the prose may be, Sacrificial Animals is savage in its details and saturated with dread.
Pay the Piper is Daniel Kraus’ second posthumous collaboration with the great George Romero. As in 2020’s The Living Dead, Kraus worked from notes to complete Romero’s vision, but this time around—perhaps freed from the weight of the filmmaker’s undead iconography—Kraus’ feels like the driving imagination of the story. The plot centres on Alligator Point, a town as mired in injustice as it is in swampland. It’s a classic small-town horror setup, with personal histories and enmities that reach far back into history and entwine with the presence of the Piper, a shape-shifting, child-killing entity who appears sparingly but with startling violence. There are surface-level comparisons to be made to well-known horror stories (most obviously, Stephen King’s IT), but Kraus couldn’t write a derivative book if he tried. Symbolic sceneries, Cajun patois, and the fey charm of Pontiac, Kraus’ nine-year-old protagonist, combine into a satisfyingly eccentric take on local monsters and ancient histories.
A Laird Barron collection is always a reason to celebrate, and this one has been gestating longer than usual. Not a Speck of Light, his first collection of stories in eight years, cements Barron’s standing as the contemporary horror writer most adept at meshing cosmic high strangeness with muscular noir—like Jack London dabbling in the Lovecraftian mythos. Stories contain eerie entities attracted to disaster sites; meanwhile, a cyborg war dog reflects on its immortal war against humanity’s many enemies, and in “The Glorification of Custer Poe,” we meet a Confederate soldier pursued by his own grizzly sins (and yes, that’s a pun of sorts!). These are some of the more easily resolved stories in the collection; others you may have to read slowly, or more than once, to fully grasp their slippery logic. This is the magic of Laird Barron: He provides too many pieces of the jigsaw and an excess of possible pictures to assemble. It’s our job to find the one that works. Nowhere is this technique more effective than in the collection’s penultimate story, “Tiptoe”—the best horror story I’ve read in many years.
A fellow master of concise, uncanny horrors, Mariana Enriquez returns to the short story, following her experiment with maximalism in 2023’s Our Share of Night. The new collection’s title story refocuses the grim real-life fate of Elisa Lam, who’s become a subject of online speculation after her body was found in a hotel water tank in 2013. In lesser hands, such a story could be a travesty of exploitation, but Enriquez has made her name in exposing the mistreatment and brutality meted out to women, often deploying horror as a sheer gauze pulled across the very real violence of the world. Other stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People range from the allusive and elusive to the grimly physical. “Face of Disgrace” literalises the notion of faceless victimhood, while “Hyena Hymns” features a haunted dress that imposes the wounds of historical torture onto the wearer. The best stories, however, concern children. “The Refrigerator Cemetery” depicts a macabre game played among the shells of abandoned appliances, and in “Black Eyes” Enriquez repurposes another famous piece of Internet lore in the attempts of two suspect children to penetrate the fragile safety of the narrator’s car. Chilling, grotesque, and slyly funny, A Sunny Place for Shady People is the author’s return to what she does best—and better than most.
Liminality is having a bit of a moment in horror: The Backrooms is clipping TikTokers out of reality, Silent Hill 2 is back with better-rendered mist, and films like Skinamarink and The Outwaters are setting film festivals achatter. Into this zeitgeist strides Sofia Ajram with a big literary “hold my beer.” Her debut novella traps the suicidal narrator in a limitless subway station. Is this impossible space real? Does it exist as an externalisation of his internal mental state or as an allegory for depression? And what, if anything, is in there with him? Coup de Grâce is equal parts fun and frantic desolation. In her references to early online folklore and a late metafictional flourish, Ajram speaks to horror’s uber-contemporary fascination with trauma and mental health but also to the current vogue for ’90s and ’00s nostalgia. Like all good liminal architecture, Coup de Grâce contains far more than its space should allow, and it unfolds like cursed origami.
Rachel Harrison has a special knack for reconfiguring horror tropes as a reflection of post-millennial angst. She’s worked with witches, werewolves, cults, and now, with So Thirsty, she’s come for the vampires. When risk-averse Sloane and her hedonistic friend Naomi cross paths with a band of vamps, they’re forced to confront the realities of an immortal life lived in the shadows. It’s not all bad news, though—there’s passion, freedom, and friendship to be found once the ticking clock of a normal life comes to a halt. Harrison blends two traditions of vampire fiction into one story: There’s gore and violence aplenty but also eroticism and romance. Linking both strands is a pointed observation on female aging in contemporary culture. It’s a sex-drizzled, blood-soaked treat, but like all of Harrison’s fiction, it has something angry and urgent to say about the conditions of reality.
Novellas are great, but too often they leave me wanting more. More character, more plot, more incident, and more emotion. Rest Stop is a full serving of all those ingredients in just 150 pages. By the time Abraham is locked into a gas-station bathroom by a homicidal maniac, we already know about his unrequited love, his conflicted Jewish faith, and his fragile relationships with friends and family—and we’re only a few dozen pages in! It’s a bravura feat of efficiency that leaves Cassidy plenty of room to eke out Abraham’s torment at the hands of his googly-eyed assailant. What follows is part creature feature (arachnophobes beware!) and part Beckettian character study. My point is that Cassidy packs a whole damn story into Rest Stop, without a word wasted. This is what a novella is supposed to be.
It’s 1962 and Jemma Barker has answered a strange invitation to leave Chicago for New Orleans, to take up employment in the mansion of the reclusive Duchon family. Once she arrives, she finds a Halloween advent calendar of Southern Gothic delights: ghosts, curses, hidden rooms, family secrets, and incestuous desires. Simmering beneath it all is the more awful and persistent trace of colouirism, which Sandeen is clear to distinguish from the genre’s more often tread and binary treatment of prejudice. Heavy as the theme is, This Cursed House is never less than absolutely fun. It’s self-aware but never self-conscious and Sandeen pauses the breakneck pace only to ensure that you have a moment to fully grasp the secrets buried in its lineages and family trees, like Wuthering Heights transposed to the Big Easy. It’s such ripe Gothic that if you squeezed it, I’m half convinced blood-red juice would stain your hands.
This novel may open with a woman in a nightgown fleeing a creepy asylum, but The Redemption of Morgan Bright is far from a traditional Gothic chiller. When Morgan inveigles her way into Hollyhock Asylum, she’s seeking answers regarding her sister’s mysterious death. Once inside, she’s assaulted by punishing systems of control and the oppressive presence of another personality inside her own head. Is she mad? Has the system made her so? Or is something else going on? (Spoiler: It’s option three.) This novel provides a chilling twist on the unreliable-narrator trope, as well as a contemporary restaging of Nellie Bly’s exposure of psychiatric cruelties. Panatier nods often to the past (the warden is named Althea Edevane, a name dripping with Victorian Gothic menace), but within the asylum walls, echoes of antiquated maltreatment go hand in hand with future-punk exploitation. The Redemption of Morgan Bright suggests that our treatment of the vulnerable never changes. Or if it does, it’s only for the worse.
Nevill’s stories are full of tight interiors, narrow minds, and entities that slip under a reader’s defences. In All the Fiends of Hell, he’s done it again but on a broader apocalyptic canvas. Granted, we only see the British portion of Armageddon, but that’s more than enough. Following a night of mass abduction by otherworldly forces, a few weak, sickly survivors are left alone under a crimson sky. Well, not alone exactly—there are also hideous monsters who can only be seen in the ruby-red light. We join an everyman and two children on a desperate race to the ocean, carrying the last, lingering shreds of forlorn hope. But hopelessness is the point of the novel, whose central question is: What keeps us going when nothing good remains? All the Fiends of Hell is an especially grim and very British Armageddon. It’s The Road as envisioned by Ken Loach. It’s also Nevill’s best book in some time.
The title of Malfi’s latest novel sets expectations of Stephen King or Norman Rockwell’s Americana. It turns out to be much stranger than that. When old friends reunite in their hometown, an inevitable showdown with their past quickly tips into the surreal. Weird ash falls from the sky, basements become liminal spaces, and a grid of hairy wires is discovered just beneath the surface of the town. Amid all of this craziness, Malfi does what he does best: He creates fully fleshed-out characters and pitches them into uncomfortable and very realistic situations. Small Town Horror defies assumption. It’s no nostalgia trip back to a rosy childhood, nor is it an ode to friendship. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again”; in this novel, Malfi asks why the hell you would want to.
What a showcase 2024 has been for the imaginative range of LP Hernandez! One of his two entries on this list, No Gods, Only Chaos is a collection of stories ranging from dark fantasy to creature feature, containing some of the most abhorrent crimes imaginable. Each story is an act of ventriloquism. Whether Hernandez is adopting the dust-bowl drawl of “From the Red Dirt,” mouthing Gen Z idioms in “The Last of Our Kind,” or exploring the broken mind of a neurodivergent killer in “The Bystander,” he obscures himself entirely within his characters and narrative voices. "Family Annihilator” is the most memorable story in the collection and even darker than its title suggests. It’s an utterly shocking piece of fiction, though not without a trace of void-black comedy. Maybe memorable is too mild a word. Unforgettable, incurable, bedeviling… it’s a story that leaves a stain. Anyone looking for a truly exciting new name in horror fiction will find something here to love or flinch away from.
There are two major strands of anxiety in Tremblay’s work. One is the psychological ambiguity of his characters; the second is his appetite for experimentation and self-awareness. Horror Movie is the most effective balancing of the two since the author’s landmark A Head Full of Ghosts. A retrospective arc details the making of a cursed film in the nineties, while in the present day, the lone surviving member of the cast works toward a remake. Any dissonance between the two accounts is further complicated by a full reproduction of the original script—and kudos to Tremblay for coming up with a screenplay that evolves from a parody of art horror to a genuinely disturbing piece of work. There’s plenty of meta commentary about horror cinema (including one agonizingly extended scene that’s just begging for a bold director to adapt), but Tremblay hasn’t forgotten to include moments of crowd-pleasing savagery, torture, and dismemberment. It makes for a book that equally thrills the head and the gut.
There have been plenty of nostalgic horror novels in recent years, but few have captured the laconic charm of the eighties and nineties paperback boom quite like Lost Man’s Lane. The elevator pitch would be “Boy takes a summer job as the assistant to a private detective and helps solve a supernatural crime,” but that’s really only one element of this long, meandering tale involving rattlesnakes, rock climbing, young love, family dynamics, and unusual friendships. Carson manages to tie off each strand in a neat and emotionally satisfying bow, even if it seems unlikely. There’s a lazy pace to his plotting, more reminiscent of a sprawling bildungsroman like The Goldfinch than any contemporary horror fiction. Lost Man’s Lane is the kind of horror novel “they” used to write. A big swing of a book, best enjoyed in a hammock with ice-cold lemonade.
Speaking of nostalgic horror, King’s latest collection of short stories reads like a homecoming. Most of the dozen stories feature a callback or a thematic link to his expansive bibliography; they also vary significantly in length, from the two-hundred-page crime nightmare “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” to razor-sharp shorts like “The Fifth Step.” The shorter stories read like nasty little jokes that would be comfortably at home in King’s collections from the seventies and eighties, while “The Dreamers” is proof that he’s still more than capable of a writing a full-blooded nightmare to equal Revival or Pet Sematary, complete with Lovecraftian hints of things lurking beneath the wall of rationality. The best of the stories benefit from a life well-lived, with a shared focus on grief and mortality. It’s evident in the horror of “Rattlesnakes” (an unexpectedly haunting pseudo sequel to Cujo) and in the gentler man’s-best-friendship of “Laurie.” The closing story stands above all, though. “The Answer Man” packs a whole human life into eighty pages, mundane but with occasional glimpses of the mystery beyond. It’s a story only King could write, and we should all be grateful he has.
Fans of Gothic fiction will feel immediately at home in Midnight Rooms. It is 1840, and the orphaned, biracial Orabella subsists on the cusp of spinsterhood before gambling debts and plot conventions lead her into marriage with the devilishly appealing Elias Blakersby. So far, so retro, and much of the reader’s early comfort is due to Orabella’s familiar discomfort in her new home. However, once the story settles in the gloomy Korringhill Manor, Coles defies expectations. As Orabella endures long nights locked in her quarters, interspersed with animalistic revelries and dreams of meat, the faux-Victorian framework collapses into fragments and fever dreams more recognisable from modernist fiction. Imagine Jane Eyre or Rebecca as rewritten by Virginia Woolf. I could not, hand on heart, say that I’ve grasped all the implications and secrets of this book or its strange household, but the disorienting flow of language makes Midnight Rooms one of the most remarkably written books of the year.
Only Stephen Graham Jones could get away with this. A first-person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age memoir about the making of a serial killer—it shouldn’t work. It should be received with the same ire and disgust as American Psycho. But the difference between the two books—and the difference between Stephen Graham Jones and Bret Easton Ellis—is emotion. Patrick Bateman was a dispassionate automaton; I Was a Teenage Slasher’s Tolly Driver is a sympathetic outcast and a victim of fate. Ellis wrote to make a point; Jones writes to tell a story and to move the reader. At different moments, we’re moved to laughter, because Jones is very happy to push toward parody or comic-book excess, but at others, especially in the novel’s later stages, we’re more likely moved to tears. If there’s any concern that Jones had nothing left to say about slashers in the wake of his Indian Lake Trilogy, this book puts it to bed. I Was a Teenage Slasher is somehow ridiculous and grounded, affected and honest, horrifying and heartfelt, all at the same time.
Valencia grew up on the West Coast and lives on the East Coast, but her debut collection is fixated on the desert states. In Mystery Lights, the American Southwest is a stage for slippage between reality and the weird, between horror and beauty, and between speculative and literary fiction. A young girl lost in a cave system meets the mutants who call it home. A newlywed couple’s marriage is founded on—and tested by—their shared sensitivity to ghosts. A corporate wellness retreat (look away, Gwyneth!) is a site for occultism and monstrous transformation. The collection is published by Tin House, which should set expectations about the stories’ literary leanings, but Valencia is not afraid to dip a toe—hell, her whole foot—into the speculative uncanny. If you enjoy the work of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado, you will find much satisfaction in Mystery Lights.
The follow-up to the crunching 2022 hit The Devil Takes You Home is, in some ways, more of the same. Once again, Iglesias casts the grit and gore of street violence against a cosmic backdrop, and he doesn’t hold back from prolonged, brutal beatdowns. However, whereas Devil felt like an assault on the reader’s spirit and good mood, House of Bone and Rain alleviates the bleakness with moments of camaraderie. Rather than one man on a mission, Iglesias sets a group of young, wild friends against the bigger fish responsible for the murder of one of their mothers. The violence is harsh and unflinching but refreshing in its honesty. As one of the heroes says early in the proceedings, this book is not about “the macho bullshit we were raised on.” Instead, House of Bone and Rain is a lament for young, dumb men and the codes they feel pressured to live by. It’s not all human tragedy, though. In a delightful nod to Lovecraft, it turns out that there are even bigger fish playing their part from just offshore…
Each entry in the Clown in a Cornfield trilogy has been bigger and stranger than the last. What began as a sociopolitical spin on the teen slasher became, in the second volume, a commentary on nostalgia, disinformation, demagoguery, and the events of 6 January (among other things). Now, in The Church of Frendo, Cesare caps his project (so far) with a novel that asks questions about religion and the myth of America itself. This all sounds very grand, and rest assured, Cesare packs in plenty of grind-house violence and folk-horror traditions—he even finds a spot for professional wrestling and Juggalos. Just the list of ingredients in this short blurb alone should give you some idea of how madcap and unexpected this book is. Indeed, the idea behind Clown in a Cornfield is so audacious that it’s difficult to believe Cesare could extend it over three volumes and stick the landing. Yet he does. The Church of Frendo is the unpredictable climax to an inimitable trilogy and proof that making horror political doesn’t make it any less fun.
I rarely consider nonfiction titles for this list but Bogutskaya’s treatise on the state of horror is a must-read for anyone seeking a refreshed perspective on the genre. Focused predominantly on horror movies released in the past decade, Feeding the Monster is a worthy successor to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and other canonical studies. It’s written with the critical rigour of an academic review but invested with all the humour and personality of the smartest blog posts from back when the Internet was fun. One minute Bogutskaya is discussing the symbolic function of hunger in horror or debating the overuse of trauma narratives; the next she’s telling us about her childhood memories of Freddy Krueger or explaining how horror helps her frame an agonizing memory of a hospital visit. It’s the perfect balance of the personal and the political with which to survey a genre that has always ricocheted between those two poles. Read it and you’ll feel smarter the next time you watch a horror movie, while the extensive watch list in the appendix will ensure you have plenty to see.
Really good haunted houses are few and far between. These days, the spirit-infested home too often falls into high camp or is put to such elevated metaphorical purpose that it forgets to actually be scary. The House of Last Resort has no such problem. When Tommy and Kate relocate from the US to a drowsy Italian village, it’s supposed to be a better life. Of course, their new abode makes a mockery of this well-being kick. The titular house comes complete with hidden rooms, hallucinations, and a historical entanglement in the Catholic Church’s struggle against some very persistent demons. Golden draws on the very best of seventies and eighties pulp-horror influences, with hordes of rats, ambulatory corpses, and a grand diabolic finale. But he makes time for quiet moments of chilling intensity, including a kitchen-table conversation that ranks among the most disquieting scenes of the year. The House of Last Resort is horror that goes hard but never forgets to be fun. It’s the author’s finest novel to date.
If you watched the climbing documentary Free Solo and thought, Okay, climbing a nine-hundred-foot cliff face without a rope is scary but you know what it really needs? Murder ghosts!, then Kiefer’s debut will scratch your itch. This Wretched Valley follows four intrepid fools into the deep Kentucky woods, where they plan to map and climb a brand-new ascent. Of course, like any backcountry worthy of a horror fan’s time, their chosen ground is saturated with bloody history. It doesn’t take kindly to interlopers, either, particularly these vain, self-absorbed numskulls. There are comparisons to be made to Scott Smith’s adventure-horror classic The Ruins, but most crucial is Kiefer’s absolute lack of mercy for her characters. For much of the book, you gleefully anticipate their foreshadowed deaths, but the manner of their end is so brutal and so desolate that you can’t avoid a creeping empathy. Kiefer has stared you down. She has more belly for this than you. She wins.
Lebbon’s most recent novels serve as a loose thematic trilogy, connected by a focus on high-octane adventure and a backdrop of quickening climate disaster. However, whereas Eden and The Last Storm were genre-splicing affairs, Among the Living goes full-bore on the horror, pitting an uneasy assemblage of climate activists and mineral excavators against a viral threat long buried in the Arctic tundra. This is no mere illness, though. What Lebbon conjures up is an intelligent disease, able to control its hosts’ thoughts and behaviour, creating a paranoiac trap in which the characters cannot even trust their own motivations. It’s easy to think of comparisons—The Thing, The Last of Us—but Lebbon brings a flair for action scenes and his experience with endurance sport, propelling the story with unexpected physical and psychological dimensions. Fast-paced, compulsive, suitably horrifying: Among the Living reads like Michael Crichton having a particularly bad dream.
If you’re familiar with Canada’s Nahanni Valley, you’ll know that wilderness has a history and lore thick enough to fill several novels. Seriously, you should take a Wikipedia dive; thank me later. All that mystery is buried in the substrata of In the Valley of the Headless Men, but Hernandez’s excursion resembles the surrealism of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, though less cold and less austere. Hernandez has a particular gift for the details of grief: the final sip of a dead mother’s lemonade, a lost child’s sock tucked safely in a purse; each is a small totem of heartbreak. And though the flesh of his novella is pared to the bone, somehow he still accommodates a trio of characters—each with their own arc of loss and redemption—on a shared journey to some ineffable, elusive truth. As for what else waits there, I shan’t tell you. it’s best you decide for yourself… and I’m still not sure that I even really know.
What if an entire neighbourhood became a ghost? Not just the people but the buildings and the street itself? And what if three girls escaped that fate, then returned twenty years later to see what remained of the homes and families they left in that sunlit purgatory? It’s a concept high enough to give you a nosebleed, but Kiste reins it in masterfully, never worrying too much about the mad logic of the situation. Instead, she centres the story on more mundane forms of haunting: the dark gravity of memory, family, and trauma. The Haunting of Velkwood reads like a literary double negative, a brand-new thing emerging from the overlap of Twin Peaks’ suburban uncanny and the melancholy nostalgia of The Virgin Suicides. Kiste doesn’t shy away from these references (David Lynch is everywhere in Velkwood), but she’s still written one of the most original—and downright strange—novels of the year so far.
Before turning to fiction, Hull wrote the screenplay for Glorious, a cult horror movie about an eldritch entity invoking apocalypse through a glory hole in a public-bathroom stall. Though not a sequel of any kind, Hull’s debut novella shares much of his movie’s grindhouse DNA. It also has a hole of its own in the titular Mouth: an inexplicable toothed orifice in the ground inherited by Randy, a good ol’ all-American drifter. Randy’s attempt to satisfy Mouth’s hunger forces him into a partnership with Abigail, a young woman with secrets to keep and vengeance to seek. Mouth comes in handy there. The novella is rapid and raw and unburdened by plot complexity, but there’s something so endearing about both the book and its innocent monster that you can’t help but cheer them on. Imagine Roger Corman’s take on Frankenstein and you’re somewhere close to Mouth’s goofy charm.
King Nyx is at the softer end of the horror colour chart. There are no ghosts or demons, and there’s barely any blood (though there are life-size marionettes to haunt your dreams). Instead, Bakis has crafted a compelling period mystery centred on the island home of a wealthy tycoon whose wives just keep dying before their time. When a young woman accompanies her husband on a personal writing retreat to the island, everything seems immediately off. The couple are quarantined in a private cabin. She sees strange bearlike figures in the woods and finds mysterious notes aplenty. All the oddity suggests something very wrong is going on in the Big House. It’s all wonderfully bizarre, but buried beneath the novel’s gothic veneer is an interrogation of supposed male genius, balanced so precariously on the shoulders of unremembered women. King Nyx is one of those thrillers that smuggle real substance into their scares without ever taking on a lecturing tone. It’s also a great gateway novel for readers who would usually shy away from horror’s excesses.
Graham Jones made this list in 2022 and again in 2023 with the first two instalments of the Indian Lake Trilogy. Now, with The Angel of Indian Lake, he absolutely sticks the landing. In this third and concluding volume, we return to the bruised and bloodied town of Proofrock, Idaho, for a final confrontation between Jade Daniels and the many monsters in her past, her present, and her head. Just as in the preceding books, Angel begins in the cold chaos of violence and metatextual references, which slowly coalesce into something human, heartfelt, and, by the end, emotionally overwhelming. Unexpected bodies rise and fall, and at no point could even this seasoned horror reader rest easy that the absolute worst would not come to pass. The Angel of Indian Lake is an almost indecent success; Jones should not have been able to guide this freewheeling, snowballing mass of story home. But he does. And like its now-iconic heroine, it remains defiant and unbowed to the end.
As I’ve covered elsewhere, horror has not traditionally been kind to characters of colour. Evans and Fennell’s anthology is sure to become a key text in the Black horror renaissance working to correct that injustice. The stories included here share one crucial characteristic: Each features a young Black female protagonist who must survive—but otherwise, it’s a sprawling survey of horror’s various subsections, every one refreshed by the Black female gaze. LL McKinney’s “Harvester” is nightmarish Americana about a very unusual cornfield. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “TMI” is an of-the-moment technophobic satire about privacy and identity, while Evans’s “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou” offers old-school Southern Gothic of the finest stripe. The Black Girl Survives in This One may be billed as young-adult literature but stories like Monica Brashears’ “The Skittering Thing” are pure adult-grade nightmare fuel. The best of them pose a question that underlies the entire anthology: Is surviving the same thing as having a happy ending?
This has been a pretty bleak and bloody list of stories so far. Let Ryan pour some sunshine into your TBR. Bless Your Heart is the tale of the Evans women, a matriarchal dynasty who runs the funeral home in their small, quaint corner of Southeast Texas. Unfortunately, the dead in their town don’t always stay dead, forcing generations of Evanses to moonlight as ghoul killers. During a particularly bad infestation of undead, the elderly Ducey (horror’s best octogenarian for a good while), her daughter Lenore, and her adult granddaughter Grace must deal with the problem while indoctrinating young Grace into their clandestine guardianship. The word that immediately springs to mind is charming, as this novel has plenty of local colour and turns of phrase. However, what elevates Bless Your Heart beyond pastiche is Ryan’s willingness to revel in full-on gore and to follow through on some genuine, last-minute emotional stakes. This was announced as the first in a series of novels, and I can’t wait to see—and try to work out—what’s going to happen next.
In the few years since LaRocca burst onto the horror scene with Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, he has steadily grown a reputation for wielding disgust and excess to singular effect. This new collection contains four novelettes, each spinning around twin themes of obsession and harm. In the title story, an estranged daughter goes home for her father’s funeral, only to discover truly hideous secrets in her family home. “All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn” may go off in a batshit-crazy direction toward the end but the central conceit of a self-harming cult with a penchant for broken glass evokes the very best of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood body horror. It’s the closing story, though—on the surface the smallest and most superficial—that really got under my skin. “Prickle” presents a vicious game of one-upmanship between two elderly friends that takes the book to a gleeful, capering conclusion. It shows that beneath his coat of many nasty colours, LaRocca has a very good (and very dark) sense of humour.
I talk a lot about “fun” horror—the kind of horror that tries to scare you, for sure, but makes the process entertaining, enjoyable, a romp, rather than a raid on your psyche. This is exactly what Thorne delivers in Diavola. As with Christopher Golden’s The House of Last Resort, Thorne transports the reader to a tiny Italian village for some very dysfunctional family drama, though any loving central relationship is replaced with the hilariously maddening repartee between Anna and her siblings. Their scratchy dynamic is a grounding contrast to the supernatural goings-on, revolving around a tower in their villa that should not be opened. Shocker: It’s opened, and craziness ensues. Diavola is a gothic gem, as full of sharply observed characterisation as it is genre tropes. I read it in two sittings and even now I’m not sure if I was supposed to laugh as much as I did. Pack this for your next holiday and avoid talking to your own family.
The Underhistory may be the most intriguing horror novel of the year so far. It’s a blend of ghost story and home-invasion thriller in which a group of criminals descends upon a haunted house in the middle of a guided tour. That’s enough of a concept to set the novel apart but Warren fully commits to a structural conceit that exposes how the architecture of houses and story are one and the same. Each chapter is titled after the whimsical name that the elderly guide, Pera, has given to the rooms of her home. While she takes her customers through the details of the house—all the while trying to placate and manage the bad men in their midst—she also reveals her own gothic history, embedded in the peculiarities of each room. Gradually, we learn that Pera is far more capable than we (or her assailants) imagine her to be. And her house is a very bad place to invade. The Underhistory reads like Shirley Jackson or Catriona Ward at their most gothically playful. It’s a wholly unique intellectual exercise and a deeply compelling page-turner.
Malerman’s Incidents Around the House is [...] a deeply discomfiting, imaginatively ripe, yet ruthlessly efficient novel in which eight-year old Bela is targeted by a malign presence in her home. This “Other Mommy" hounds the girl with a request to “go into your heart.” What follows is a chase narrative of claustrophobic terror that almost transcends articulation. Glimpses of Other Mommy are elusive to the point of impressionism (she has long, hairy arms and “ slides across the floor”). What does this mean? What is she? We never know, as we are only ever given the compromised perspective of a frantic child or a terrified adult. It’s as if Malerman has channelled something into the very sentences of this novel, something that is so much greater than the sum of its linguistic parts. Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read.
Originally published on Esquire US
Richard Ayoade’s arms are crossed. The faded sitcom star will remain in this quasi-foetal pose for the duration of our interview, an interview to which he has only agreed “under protest”. Supposedly, the panel show “regular” is meant to be talking to me about his book, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a somewhat breathless biography of the little-remembered dramatist. Does he appreciate the irony, I gently prod, that he is seeking to promote a biography of another man who is difficult to interview?
“Oh, Hughes wasn’t against interviews,” he says, the nasal bleat even more shrill without the compression of broadcast television. “Hughes would talk and talk. He just refused to explain himself.” Whereas Ayoade seems little more than an inconsequential collection of borrowed tics and insincere self-effacement, the playwright to whom he refers was all gravitas, depth and mystery. Hughes’s first play, Platform, a verbal dance between a beatnik and a bourgeois, debuted in 1960, but it was his television series The Harauld Hughes Half Hour Play (1965) that made him a household name.
I ask Ayoade if he has long been an admirer. “Well,” he says, managing to make even that single syllable a sedative, “since I was 14 or so.” Because I was clearly asking him whether he started engaging with absurdist post-modernism at primary school. In a sickening passage of auto-hagiography, Ayoade recalls his first encounter with the work of Hughes in the opening chapter of The Unfinished Harauld Hughes:
I was panning for classics in a second-hand bookshop when I looked up to see the stress-pinked eyes of the bookshop owner, Keith, a piece of white chocolate softening in his ghostly hands.
“You have a double,” he said.
This used to happen often. People would say I reminded them of someone they knew. What they tended to mean was that they had once met another person whom they couldn’t confidently categorise in terms of ethnicity—a variation on “Where are you from, originally?”
I said either “Oh” or “Huh?” or “Right”, one of those barely communicative cul-de-sacs designed to bring conversation to a close, but Keith persisted.
“Look under ‘H’,” he said. “‘H’ for Hughes.”
I held up a copy of “Birthday Letters”.
“Not that windswept bastard. Harauld. H. A. R. A. U. L. D. The mother was Welsh.”
I found the name on a spine. “Harauld Hughes: The Two-Hander Trilogy”.
“Look on the back,” Keith said.
I looked. I saw the author’s picture.
I had a double. Even in profile, the resemblance was remarkable. It was me.
Ayoade reaches for a reference, as if being a stammering quotebox of aphorisms amounts to a personality
It seems fitting that Ayoade’s biography, framed as a“quest” to discover the “real” Harauld Hughes (did anyone go on a quest to find the “unreal”?) reads less as inquiry, and more as a wallow in his own filth. Even a turgid would-be stylist like Ayoade (sleep easy, Nabakov, your crown is unclaimed) is unable to rob the story of Hughes of all readability, though. His is a fascinating tale. The child of an “oft-lapsed” nun and an unknown Nigerian, Harauld Hughes was raised in Elephant and Castle by Clifton “Monkey” Perch, a former flame of Hughes’s mother and father of their twin boys (and therefore Hughes’s half-brothers), Mickie and Colin. Hughes discovered his gift for dialogue and began to write a raft of potent, brutal plays in which wounded men prowl the stage, spouting invective and double talk. He should be remembered alongside Beckett, Pinter and Osborne. “Why isn’t he?” I ask.
When in doubt, Ayoade reaches for a reference, as if being a stammering quotebox for the aphorisms of others amounts to a personality. “Orson Welles said posterity is vulgar,” he screeches. “You never quite know who will be remembered by history.”
“Do you think you will be remembered by history?”I ask him.
“I hope not,” he lies. “In any case, I don’t think I need worry.” He’s right, it is we who need worry.
“So do you feel it’s just bad luck—that Hughes could have as easily entered the pantheon as—say—James Joyce or Virginia Woolf ?”
“I think Hughes may have been a victim of his own concision,” Ayoade offers.
Ah yes, how many brave men have we lost to concision? On he drizzles...
“Hughes only wrote one play, Dependence, that came anywhere close to being full-length.” Ayoade saying “full-length” causes me to dry heave. He doesn’t notice.
“Many of his other works are barely 15 minutes, especially if performed at a clip, so they’re hard to programme. I think that’s why they haven’t entered the repertoire.”
But surely, they could be bundled into one large piece—say an evening of three of his works.
“They used to do that more often. As I mentioned,” he says with the lack of grace that seems to be his stock in trade, “the first of his plays I read was a volume called The Two-Hander Trilogy.” If you want me to remember what you say, try being less forgettable.
“Did you change your views on Harauld Hughes during the writing of your book?”
“Well, I didn’t really have a view about him before...”
Oh. My. God.
“He’s a brilliant writer—he has his flaws of course—but I feel the real reason Hughes has disappeared is that he stopped publishing. His last play was in 1972, his last screenplay was only a few years after that, and that film fell apart.”
Ayoade slows, sensing difficult territory, or perhaps he’s having a sugar crash after his second hot chocolate
The face of whoever will hire him is talking about the film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, one of the more notorious “lost” films in British cinema history, and a central strand in Ayoade’s book. Bedlam was to be directed by Leslie Francis, the man behind the film And...?! (1969), which won the award for most innovatively punctuated film at the Berlinale. The shoot apparently ended in a full physical fight between Hughes and his half-brother Mickie Perch (its producer), culminating in an escape by helicopter.
“And of course, Hughes met Lady Virginia...”
Ayoade slows, sensing difficult territory, or perhaps he’s having a sugar crash after his second hot chocolate. “I think he didn’t feel the same need for global validation.” Maybe next time, Ayoade, counterfeiting balance, could write something similarly patronising about the countless women artists made mute by egomaniacal husbands.
Hughes’s widow, Lady Virginia Lovilocke, has not responded with what could be called enthusiasm to Ayoade’s biography, terming it “the worst kind of populist drivel”.
Does her assessment sting?
“I’m just pleased she thinks it could be popular,” Ayoade quips. Perhaps, one day, history will prove them both wrong, vulgar as that verdict might seem.
THE EARLY ONE: PLATFORM (1960)
An actress, on a railway platform at night, sees her bourgeois assumptions shattered when she encounters a straight-talking rocker.
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE LATE WORK: DEPENDENCE (1972)
In a post-apocalyptic world, only publishers remain. But what is there to publish? Wins the Evening Standard Award for the Year’s Longest Play in Proportion to Its Script. The Times describes it as“more pause than play” and “spectacularly hermetic”.
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE EARLY ONE:
THE ESPECIALLY WAYWARD GIRL (1967)
A rebellious girl is sent to a reform school that has a hidden secret: the pupils are addicted to human blood (otherwise it’sa relatively good school)! Find it in “The Models Trilogy” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
THE LATE MASTERPIECE: THE DEADLY GUST (1973)When a glamorous female novelist travels to a notoriously windy island, she finds herself battling gusts both external and internal. Find it in “Four Films” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
“THE BREAKDOWN”
With its haunting opening couplet:
Have you broken down?
(I have broken down.)
Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber
Hughes’s legendary acceptance address on receiving the 1986 Euripides Prize for Short Form Drama, in which he tells us, during a speech, that his plays must speak for themselves. Find it in “Pieces, Plays, Poems” by Harauld Hughes, published by Faber & Faber ○
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade is out now.
Originally published on Esquire UK
A new Tana French novel is an event, as it has been since her debut In the Woods (2007) established her astonishing command of the crime genre, specifically the police procedural. Five more novels in the Dublin Murder Squad series followed, cementing and extending French’s formidable reputation for literary-minded crime.
As good as those books are, French’s most recent efforts are of even greater interest to me, as they experiment with different genre forms. The Witch Elm (2018) was a psychological thriller with a wholly unreliable narrator, while The Searcher (2020) was, in her words, “mystery software running on Western hardware.” French isn’t one to rest on laurels when she could be challenging herself.
So it was a surprise and a delight to discover that her new novel, The Hunter, is a follow-up to The Searcher—one that takes some narrative cues from the Dublin Murder Squad books but from the inside out. Two years have passed since the events of The Searcher, and now, retired Chicago PD detective Cal Hooper has eased into small-town West Ireland life, taking comfort in his growing relationship with local widow Lena Dunne and his mentorship of Trey Reddy, now 15 and coming into her own. Then Trey’s father, Johnny Reddy, returns to summer-sweltering Ardnakelty after years away in London, bringing with him a moneyed stranger and talk of a gold rush. That stirring up the town with the prospect of unexpected riches leads to murder is inevitable but it’s the way French unspools that inevitability—languidly, until it’s almost too late—that makes The Hunter so memorable.
French and I spoke over Zoom about writing an unexpected follow-up, why The Hunter is a climate novel, surprising connections to the earlier Dublin Murder Squad books, and looking for “gold in them thar hills.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: After finishing The Searcher, did you know that you would be writing a sequel? Was Cal Hooper intended to be a series character? Because I didn’t think so the first time I read The Searcher, but when I read it again in advance of our conversation, I started to think otherwise.
TANA FRENCH: You’re right, The Searcher was originally intended to be a standalone. I’d just handed [the novel] in when the pandemic hit. So there was a while in there where I wasn’t doing any writing because I had two little kids at home doing distance learning. And, like everybody else, my subconscious was basically a smoking crater while I tried to figure out what on earth was going on. And you kind of need your subconscious, if you're a writer—it does a lot of the work. So I didn't do anything for a while. And when I emerged from that and started thinking about the next book, I started realising that I wanted to do more with that place and that world I'd set up because The Searcher is a kind of mystery software running on Western hardware.
I like that phrase a lot.
It was playing with the resonances between the Western, which I had just discovered, and the West of Ireland—the things they have in common and the ways that the Western tropes map quite well onto that West of Ireland setting. In The Searcher, I was playing with things like the stranger in town who comes in, shifts things, and acts as a catalyst. I just felt like there were more Western tropes that would map really well onto that world.
A world like that, that little village of Ardnakelty—it's so packed with secrets and stories that it felt like there was more candy in the piñata, with more stories to tell. And you know the gold rush trope? It fits well with Ireland! Oddly enough, there is, in fact, a long history of very serious gold archaeological artefacts being found in Ireland. Clearly, there's been gold being dug up in Ireland for a long time. There have been little mini gold rushes over the centuries, and some fairly recent ones, too—people are still out there in the border mountains going, “I think there might be [some] gold here.” So, it doesn't actually seem too implausible for a character to suggest that there might be “gold in them thar hills.”
Another classic Western trope is revenge. Because it never turns out to be a simple thing. It's never, “You track down the building where you shoot him, you're done.” It's always morally ambiguous, morally complex, something that doesn't turn out exactly the way you plan. So I wanted to play a little bit with that. It seemed to me that Trey had every reason and every right to need some kind of revenge. It also seemed to me that Cal and Trey’s relationship had been left at kind of an interesting place where it was developing, but fragile. If somebody came in and shook it up, that balance would be disrupted. What would happen? The obvious person to shake it up was Trey’s absent dad, Johnny—he’s the kind of guy who if he came home, would bring with him a big “get rich quick” scheme.
I have so many follow-up questions about this. But the first thing I thought of was that with respect to the Gold Rush, you're also writing this in Ireland, which went through the Celtic Tiger. In a way, that was kind of a gold rush.
Yeah, it kind of was—it had the same almost hysterical fanatical passion involved in it. And also the sense of unpredictability: we were being told that this was all under control, that the housing boom was going to keep on going forever. So, you could absolutely pay top whack for something in the middle of nowhere that you were buying off plans, and it would all be fine because, in five years, you could turn ten times the price. So, it was presented as this very modern, very controlled economic phenomenon. But the mood around it wasn't like that at all. It was this frenzy, this absolute feeding frenzy. People queued for days to buy those houses off plans, with newspapers reporting on a 10 per cent increase overnight, practically. So, it had that gold rush feel. And when it all went wrong, it had that psychologically gutting feeling where people had the ground ripped out from under them. They were left with nothing because they had staked everything on their little gold rush. So, yeah, you're right. I hadn't actually thought about that.
Why set The Hunter two years after the end of The Searcher? To give Cal, Trey, and Lena some time and space to have some stable time together? You even have a line about how Cal and the town “have reached an equilibrium, amicable if not particularly trusting, maintained with care and a certain amount of caution on all sides.”
Two years felt about right. Partly for the relationships to have started to build solid foundations but they haven’t really had time to become concrete. So, it's still very disruptive. But it’s also about Cal's relationship with the town because this isn't like The Searcher, which was Cal’s story. This is a story about the relationship between three people: Cal, Trey and Lena. I wanted their relationships to have time to blossom and spread out and develop the intricacies that make them interesting. But I also wanted the relationship between Carl and the town to shift, too.
In The Searcher, he’s a newcomer. He's just wandered in here from America. Nobody knows him, which in a small town in Ireland is a huge thing. And he knows nobody. So he is the outsider coming into this closed community. But in The Hunter, Cal is in a kind of strange borderland where he's an accepted outsider; he knows the place and they have an established relationship. That gives a different kind of power. He has the power of knowing the town and knowing its dynamics, but he’s not bound by its rules in the same way as an insider.
There are so many evocative descriptions in The Hunter of the blistering summer heat and how it almost bends everyone (particularly everyone in Ardnakelty) to its will. As Cal says, “Whenever it stays hot too long, I’m just waiting for things to get messy.” Would you call The Hunter a climate novel?
Oh, god, yeah. Especially in a location like this, because I wanted a sense of some kind of unsettling, almost unnatural pressure on the characters. And around here, especially in the West [of Ireland], a heat wave does that. We're not used to them. The natural range for Ireland is from on the cold side to a bit warm. Once the temperature hit 25 degrees in 2016, people went nuts.
To the characters in this book—not the three main ones but to most of the rest of them—it's more than that. These are farmers. So this isn't just psychologically unsettling; this has a concrete effect on their livelihoods. This is something that's going to affect the whole lambing season. It's affecting their crops; it's affecting the feed they've got for their cattle over the winter. So that's one of the reasons why they're so susceptible to Johnny Reddy’s wonderful “get rich quick” scheme when he comes in with it because they're in a very vulnerable place. They're on the defensive and feeling under threat—not just psychologically but financially. So it does end up being a crucial factor in the way the plot unfolds, as well as the atmosphere.
Once there’s a murder, it’s almost as if The Hunter gets into a familiar Murder Squad-like gear, particularly in the interrogation scenes. Did it feel like slipping on an old pair of gloves to write these particular scenes or did they feel new because of different characters being involved?
The main thing that was interesting was that I was doing it from the reverse perspective from the Dublin Murder Squad. Here, it’s from the perspective of the people being interrogated, who go in there with their own agendas, each one of them different at different times and in different interrogations. So, it's not about the detectives trying to bring everything together, find the truth and make everything fit neatly into place. It's about the characters trying to manage the situation so that it goes in a direction that works for them—which, for all of them, oddly, has very little to do with the murder. And who did it? None of the three main characters actually care that much. They care much more about their relationships, their world and Trey ending up basically okay, as unscathed as possible by this whole situation. So the detective is not some crusader for truth and justice but just this obstacle that they have to get past and manoeuvre and navigate in a way that will let things come out okay.
The detective is not some crusader for truth and justice, but just this obstacle.
I mean, on the one hand, the cop is working the case but it's much more interesting that they are working the cop. They're also working on each other and themselves, to try to keep that equilibrium that they fought so hard to maintain for the last two years so that it doesn't literally and metaphorically blow up in their face.
They are just trying to deal more with what this means to everyone around the murder, rather than who’s done it. Murder has a huge impact. There are ripple effects on everyone who's touched by it, from the detective to the community, to the people who knew the victim and people who knew the murderer. Here they're trying to deal with that ripple effect, rather than with the murder itself.
A couple more questions before we sign off. First, are you still going to inhabit this world for your next book? Or are you going to give Cal, Trey and Lena a break?
It's early days because I'm just getting stuck into something new. But at the moment, what I'm getting stuck into is the third in what's turning out to be a trilogy, which I did not expect.
The Hunter definitely has the “second book in a trilogy” feel to it.
Yeah, I just feel like that arc needs completing somehow. All the characters have been moving on an arc in their relationships with each other and with the place, and that arc is not complete—one more should do it.
I’m obligated to ask: do you feel like, at some point, the Dublin Murder Squad is going to return in some capacity? Or is it just that these were the books of your earlier years, and now you have so many other stories to tell? I'm curious what your current relationship is with those earlier books.
I don't know—I don't rule it out, because I don't rule anything out. But I've come to realise that as a writer, I'm only happy when I'm a little bit outside my comfort zone. I like feeling that I've bitten off just a little more than I may be able to chew and that I'm not in any danger of falling into the trap of writing the same book over and over. Faithful Place has elements of noir and The Likeness has elements of the Gothic. But overall, the [Dublin Murder Squad] books were all from the same perspective of the detective undergoing an investigation and trying to reimpose order on the chaos that is murder. It was starting to feel, I mean, not easy. It's never easy but it was starting to feel like something I knew how to do.
It sounds like you prefer, as a writer, to live in the discomfort than to take on something that you're familiar with, even if you can push against those constraints.
Yeah. I need to feel like I'm learning a new skill as I do this every time. And unless I'm doing that, I'm worried that I'm somehow shortchanging people who aren't giving them what I gave them before.
But what about what you're giving yourself?
Oh, I just love doing this! [laughs]
Originally published on Esquire US
In the age of AI, it can feel as if this technology’s march into our lives is inevitable. From taking our jobs to writing our poetry, AI is suddenly everywhere we don’t want it to be.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Just ask Madhumita Murgia, the AI editor at The Financial Times and the author of the barn-burning new book Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI. Unlike most reporting about AI, which focuses on Silicon Valley power players or the technology itself, Murgia trains her lens on ordinary people encountering AI in their daily lives.
This “global precariat” of working people is often irrevocably harmed by these dust-ups; as Murgia writes, the implementation and governance of algorithms has become “a human rights issue.” She tells Esquire, “Whether it was health care, criminal justice, or government services, again and again you could see the harms perpetrated on mostly marginalised groups, because that’s how the AI supply chain is built.”
Murgia takes readers around the globe in a series of immersive reported vignettes, each one trained on AI’s damaging effects on the self, from “your livelihood” to “your freedom.” In Amsterdam, she highlights a predictive policing program that stigmatises children as likely criminals; in Kenya, she spotlights data workers lifted out of brutal poverty but still vulnerable to corporate exploitation; in Pittsburgh, she interviews UberEats couriers fighting back against the black-box algorithms that cheat them out of already meagre wages.
Yet there are also bright spots, particularly a chapter set in rural Indian villages, where under-resourced doctors use AI-assisted apps as diagnostic aids in their fight against tuberculosis. Despite the prevalent sense of impending doom, there’s still time to reconfigure our relationship to this technology, Murgia insists. “This is how we should all see AI,” she tells Esquire, “as a way to preserve the world we know and believe in what we bring to it, but then use it to augment us.”
Murgia spoke with Esquire by Zoom from her home in London about data labour, the future of technology regulation, and how to keep AI from reading bedtime stories to our children.
ESQUIRE: What is data colonialism, and how do we see it manifest through the lens of AI?
MADHUMITA MURGIA: Two academics, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, came up with this term to draw parallels between modern colonialism and older forms of colonialism, like the British colonisation of India and other parts of the world. The resource extraction during that period harmed the lives of those who were colonised, much like how corporations today, particularly tech companies, are performing a similar kind of resource extraction. In this case, rather than oil or cotton, the resource is data.
In reporting this book, I saw how big Silicon Valley firms go to various parts of the world I visited, like India, Argentina, Kenya, and Bulgaria, and use the people there as data points to build systems that become trillion-dollar companies. But the people never see the full benefits of those AI systems to which they’ve given their data. Whether it was health care, criminal justice, or government services, again and again you could see the harms perpetrated on mostly marginalised groups, because that’s how the AI supply chain is built.
You write that data workers “are as precarious as factory workers; their labour is largely ghost work and they remain an undervalued bedrock of the AI industry.” What would it take to make their labour more apparent, and what would change if the reality of how AI works was more widely understood?
For me, the first surprise was how invisible these workers really are. When I talk to people, they’re shocked to learn that there are factories of real humans who tag data. Most assume that AI teaches itself somehow. So even just increasing understanding of their existence means that people start thinking, There’s somebody on the other end of this. Beyond that, the way the AI supply chain is set up, we only see the engineers building the final product. We think of them as the creators of the technology, so automatically, all the value is placed there.
Of course, these are brilliant computer scientists, so you can see why they’re paid millions of dollars for their work. But because the workers on the other end of the supply chain are so invisible, we underplay what they’re worth, and that shows up in the wages. Yes, these are workers in developing countries, and this is a standard outsourcing model. But when you look at the huge disparity in their living wage of $2.50 an hour going into the technology inside a Tesla car, and then you see what a Tesla car costs or what Elon Musk is worth or what that company is making, the disparity is huge. There’s just no way these workers benefit from being a part of this business.
If you hear technologists talking about it, they say we all get brought along for the ride—that productivity rises, bottom lines rise, money is flushed into our economy, and all of our lives get better. But what we’re seeing in practise is those who are most in need of these jobs are not seeing the huge upside that AI companies are starting to see, and so we’re failing them in that promise. We have to decide as a society: What is fair pay for somebody who’s part of this pipeline? What labour rights should they have? These workers don’t really have a voice. They’re so precarious economically. And so we need to have an active discussion. If there are going to be more AI systems, there’s going to be more data labour, so now is the time for us to figure out how they can see the upside of this revolution we’re all shouting from the rooftops about.
One of our readers asks: What are your thoughts on publishers like The New York Times suing OpenAI for copyright infringement? Do you think they’ll succeed in protecting journalists from seeing their work scraped and/or plagiarised?
This hits hard for me, because I’m both the person reporting on it and the person that it impacts. We’ve seen how previous waves of technological growth, particularly the social media wave, have undermined the press and the publishing industry. There’s been a huge disintermediation of the news through social media platforms and tech platforms; these are now the pipes through which people get information, and we rely on them to do it for us. We’ve come to a similar inflection point where you can see how these companies can scrape the data we’ve all created and generate something that looks a lot like what we do with far less labor, time, and expertise.
It could easily undermine what creative people spend their lives doing. So I think it’s really important that the most respected and venerable institutions take a stand for why human creativity matters. Ultimately, I don’t know what the consequences will be. Maybe it’s a financial deal where we’re compensated for what we’ve produced, rather than it being scraped for free. There are a range of solutions. But for me, it’s important that those who have a voice stand up for creative people in a world where it's easy to automate these tasks to the standard of “good enough.”
Another reader asks: What AI regulations do you foresee governments enacting? Will ethical considerations be addressed primarily through legislation, or will they rely on nonlegal frameworks like ethical codes?
Especially over the last five years, there have been dozens and dozens of codes of conduct, all self-regulating. It’s exactly like what we saw with social media. There has been no Internet regulation, so companies come up with their own terms of service and codes of conduct. I think this time around, with the AI shift, there’s a lot more awareness and participation from regulators and governments.
There’s no way around it; there will be regulation because regulation is required. Even the companies agree with this, because you can’t define what’s ethical when you’re a corporation, particularly a profit-driven corporation. If these things are going to impact people’s health, people’s jobs, people’s mortgages, and whether somebody ends up in jail or gets bail, you need regulation involved. We’ll need lines drawn in the sand, and that will come via the law.
In the book, you note how governments have become dependent on these private tech companies for certain services. What would it look like to change course there, and if we don’t, where does that road lead?
It goes back to that question of colonialism. I spoke to Cori Crider, who used to be a lawyer for Guantanamo Bay prisoners and is now fighting algorithms. She sees them as equally consequential, which is really interesting. She told me about reading a book about the East India Company and the Anglo Iranian Oil Corporation, which played a role in the Iranian coup in the ’70s, and how companies become state-like and the state becomes reliant on them. Now, decades later, the infrastructure of how government runs is all done on cloud services.
There are four or five major cloud providers, so when you want to roll out something quickly at scale, you need these infrastructure companies. It’s amazing that we don’t have the expertise or even the infrastructure owned publicly; these are all privately owned. It’s not new, right? You do have procurement from the private sector, but it’s so much more deeply embedded when it comes to cloud services and AI, because there are so few players who have the knowledge and the expertise that governments don’t. In many cases, these companies are richer and have more users than many countries. The balance of who has the power is really shifting.
When you say there are so few players, do you see any sort of antitrust agitation here?
In the U.S., the FTC is looking at this from an antitrust perspective. They’re exploring this exact question: “If you can’t build AI services without having a cloud infrastructure, then are you in an unfair position of power? If you’re not Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or a handful of others, and you need them to build algorithms, is that fair? Should they be allowed to invest and acquire these companies and sequester that?” That’s an open question here in the UK as well. The CMA, which is our antitrust body, is investigating the relationships between Microsoft, OpenAI, and startups like Mistral, which have received investment from Microsoft.
I think there will be an explosion of innovation, because that’s what Silicon Valley does best. What you’re seeing is a lot of people building on top of these structures and platforms, so there will be more businesses and more competition in that layer. But it’s unclear to me how you would ever compete on building a foundational model like a GPT-4 or a Gemini without the huge investment access to infrastructure and data that these three or four companies have. So I think there will be innovation, but I’m not sure it will be at that layer.
In the final chapter of the book, you turn to science fiction as a lens on this issue. In this moment where the ability to make a living as an artist is threatened by this technology, I thought it was inspired to turn to a great artist like Ted Chiang. How can sci-fi and speculative fiction help us understand this moment?
You know, it’s funny, because I started writing this book well before ChatGPT came out. In fact, I submitted my manuscript two months after ChatGPT came out. When it did come out, I was trying to understand, “What do I want to say about this now that will still ring true in a year from now when this book comes out?” For me, sci-fi felt like the most tangible way to actually explore that question when everything else seemed to be changing. Science fiction has always been a way for us to imagine these futures, to explore ideas, and to take those ideas through to a conclusion that others fear to see.
I love Ted Chiang’s work, so I sat down to ask him about this. Loads of technologists in Silicon Valley will tell you they were inspired by sci-fi stories to build some of the things that we writers see as dystopian, but technologists interpret them as something really cool. We may think they’re missing the point of the stories, but for them, it’s a different perspective. They see it through this optimistic lens, which is something you need to be an entrepreneur and build stuff like the metaverse.
Sci-fi can both inspire and scare, but I think more than anything, we are now suffering from a lack of imagination about what technology could do in shaping humans and our relationships. That’s because most of what we’re hearing is coming from tech companies. They’re putting the products in our hands, so theirs are the visions that we receive and that we are being shaped by. That’s fine; that’s one perspective. But there are so many other perspectives I want to hear, whether that’s educators or public servants or prosecutors. AI has entered those areas already, but I want to hear their visions of what they think it could do in their world. We’re very limited on those perspectives at the moment, so that’s where science fiction comes in. It expands our imagination of the possibilities of this thing, both the good and the bad, and figuring out what we want out of it.
I loved what Chiang had to say about how this technology exposes “how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.” When I think about AI, I often think that these companies have gotten it backwards. As a viral tweet so aptly put it: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can do my art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes.” That’s a common sentiment—a lot of us would like to see AI take over the bullshit in our lives, but instead it’s threatening our joys. How have we gotten to this point where the push is for AI to do what we love and what makes us human instead of what we’d actually like to outsource?
I think about this all the time. When it started off, automation was just supposed to help us do the difficult things that we couldn’t. Way back at the beginning of factory automation, the idea was “We’ll make your job safer, and you can spend more time on the things that you love.” Even with generative AI, it was supposed to be about productivity and email writing. But we’ve slid into this world where it’s undermining the things that, as you say, make us human. The things that make our lives worth living and our jobs worth doing. It’s something I try to push back on; when I hear this assumption that AI is good, I have to ask, “But why? What should it be used for?” Why aren’t we talking about AI doing our taxes—something that we struggle with and don’t want to spend our time doing?
This is why we need other voices and other imaginings. I don’t want AI to tell bedtime stories to my children. I don’t want AI to read all audiobooks, because I love to hear my favourite author read her own memoir. I think that’s why that became a meme and spoke to so many people. We’ve all been gaslighted into believing that AI should be used to write poetry. It’s part of a shift we’ll all experience together from saying, “It’s amazing how we’ve invented something that can write and make music” to “Okay, but what do we actually need it for?” Let’s not accept its march into these spaces where we don’t want it. That’s what my book is about: about having a voice and finding a way to be heard.
I’m reminded of the chapter about a doctor using AI as a diagnostic aid. It could never replace her, but it’s a great example of how this technology can support a talented professional.
She’s such a good personification of how we can preserve the best of our humanity but be open to how AI might help us with what we care about; in her case, that’s her patients. But crucially, her patients want to see her. That’s why I write about her previous job, where people were dying and she didn’t have the equipment to help them. She had to accept that there were limitations to what she could do as a doctor, but she could perform the human side of medicine, which people need and appreciate. This is how we should all see AI: as a way to preserve the world we know and believe in what we bring to it, but then use it to augment us. She was an amazing voice to help me understand that.
With the daily torrent of frightening news about the looming threat of AI, it’s easy to feel hopeless. What gives you hope?
I structured my book to start with the individual and end with wider society. Along the way, I discovered amazing examples of people coming together to fight back, to question, to break down the opacity in automation and AI systems. That’s what gives me hope: that we are all still engaging with this, that we’re bringing to it our humanness, our empathy, our rage. That we’re able to collectivise and find a way through it. The strikes in Hollywood were a bright spot, and there’s been so much change in the unionisation of gig workers across the world, from Africa to Latin America to Asia. It gives me hope that we can find a path and we’re not just going to sleepwalk into this. Even though I write about the concentration of power and influence that these companies have, I think there’s so much power in human collectivism and what we can achieve.
Also, I believe that the technology can do good, particularly in health care and science; that’s an area where we can really break through the barriers of what we can do as people and find out more about the world. But we need to use it for that and not to replace us in doing what we love. My ultimate hopefulness is that humans will figure out a way through this somehow. I’ve seen examples of that and brought those stories to light in my book. They do exist, and we can do this.
Originally published on Esquire US
At least once every year, a debut short-story collection comes along and gets under my skin. Last year, it was Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, and the year before that, it was Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma. All these months later, despite reading thousands of pages since, I can still remember plot details from individual stories in those books.
In 2024, that collection is Beautiful Days, by Zach Williams—a subtle and speculative barn-burner that fans of Stephen King and Ling Ma will devour. Like the short fiction of Brian Evenson, the stories in Beautiful Days are about the horrors of encountering something completely unknowable in the course of everyday life, whether it’s the mind-warping experience of parenthood or the echo-chamber effect of the Internet and social media.
It opens with “Trial Run,” in which a Manhattan office drone is trapped in a skyscraper during a snowstorm that may or may not be real, with two coworkers who may or may not mean him harm. In “Neighbors,” which went viral in The New Yorker earlier this year, a San Francisco man tries to perform a wellness check on his next-door neighbor, only to stumble upon a scene he can’t rationally explain.
In “Wood Sorrel House,” new parents find themselves in an Edenic setting to raise their child but can’t remember how they got there. These stories wade into uncanny waters gradually, but others—like “Return to Crashaw,” featuring tourists who visit mysterious megaliths in the desert—embrace their pulp inspirations from line one.
Despite Stephen King’s You Like It Darker sitting on top of the New York Times bestseller list right now, some people in the American publishing industry see short stories as an endangered species—or at least as a genre that’s becoming harder and harder to sell. “I was writing for myself,” Williams tells Esquire. “I wasn’t thinking about the marketability of what I was writing. I was just thinking of what I could write best—and what I could finish.”
Williams grew up in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware, earned his MFA at NYU, and now teaches fiction writing at Stanford University. Over Zoom last month, we spoke about writing short stories in an industry built to sell novels, getting fired from a Hollywood job for reading books under his desk, and why you might be reading more short stories than you realize. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: When did reading and writing first come into your life?
ZACH WILLIAMS: Video games were big for me in that regard. Myst and Riven were so immersive that I read the [spin-off] novels. Tim Schafer [game director of Grim Fandango] was also a really important writer for me. But I loved going to the library as a kid and reading Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark—and all those Time Life supernatural mystery books on UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster.
When I tried writing short stories in my early twenties, I think I just fundamentally didn’t have anything to write about, so when I graduated college, I moved out to L.A. and got an internship at Beacon Pictures. I got fired because all the interns showed up at this party one night where we weren’t supposed to be. After that, I worked as an assistant to the post-production coordinator on this Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony movie called El Cantante, and then I was the fifth assistant in Jerry Bruckheimer’s office during the Pirates of the Caribbean shoot—until I got fired for reading books under my desk when there wasn’t anything to do.
I got the sense that I wasn’t in the right place, so I taught middle and high school for twelve years. It was a lot like Mr. Holland’s Opus, where it was supposed to be this brief interlude while I figured out how to be a writer, but I did it for a long time and could only write in fits and starts. Once I got married and we had our first son, I finally felt like I’d been around long enough to write stories with a sense of urgency.
What drew you to short stories as opposed to novels?
In middle school, the only book I would ever reread was The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. The idea of a novel-in-stories was really fascinating to me. A lot of my undergraduate creative-writing classes were focused on short stories just by virtue of the workshop format. For me, short stories have this very direct relationship with the subconscious. One idea that’s really exciting for a writer is usually enough to get a short story off the ground. Even the stories in this collection that I worked on for years, they all originated with one spark. I wrote two stories in [Beautiful Days], “Red Light” and “Neighbors,” right after these nights of terrible insomnia, where I was just lying in bed for hours and the ideas just erupted from my subconscious. They didn’t need to become sprawling projects.
Publishing a short story in The New Yorker is a holy grail for a lot of writers. What was that like for you?
It was a wild experience to have that be my first time in print. At NYU’s [MFA program], they have this agent meet-and-greet at the end of the year, and mine was virtual because of the pandemic. I wound up having a call with Claudia [Ballard at William Morris Endeavor], and she asked to see one of my stories after I gave her my elevator pitch for the collection. I sent her “Wood Sorrel House,” and she said right away, “I want to send this story to The New Yorker.” I signed with Claudia that summer, and then the editorial process at The New Yorker was unbelievable. Working with Deborah [Treisman] and her fact checkers and copy editors was a real education. They found all of these things in the story that I had lost the ability to see myself.
It must be hard to fact-check a story like “Wood Sorrel House,” which is set in another reality.
My favorite thing that came out of fact-checking “Wood Sorrel House”—I still think about it with such gratitude—is that outside the cottage in that story, there’s one of those turtle-shaped sandboxes. We have so much overlap in our background; is that a familiar thing from your childhood, too?
Yes, we had one in our backyard.
Perfect. So I had written that it was made by Playskool because that’s what I remembered, but no, they were made by Little Tikes. The fact checker discovered this, and I was so thrilled to get that correction.
Which story in this collection was the hardest to write and revise?
“Lucca Castle” was really difficult, and the other two that come to mind are “Ghost Image” and “Return to Crashaw.” I didn’t know what I was doing. I started things without knowing how long they were going to be. Every single story was a learning process for me. There is very little in this book that I did on purpose, because I was trying to write intuitively.
Why open the collection with “Trial Run” and close with “Return to Crashaw”?
There were times when I would try to think of this book like an album. I thought about how the stories sounded together in a musical way. “Return to Crashaw” just felt like an ending in the sound of the sentences and the language—and the way that there’s music on that last page. There’s also a sort of warmth to that story for me, whereas “Trial Run” is the total opposite. It’s dark and scary and claustrophobic and paranoid. I’ve always had “Trial Run” up front because there’s something about walking into that building in the snowstorm that felt like the start of something, in the same way that the music at the end of “Return to Crashaw” felt like an ending to me.
How can the short story make a case for itself in 2024? Big Five publishers have disinvested in short stories as a genre, and it seems like readers prefer novels.
So many of the best books I’ve read recently have been short-story collections or novels-in-stories. Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection from 2022, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, has one of the all-time great short stories about video games in it. There’s also Out There, by Kate Folk; Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma; After the Sun, by Jonas Eika. Jonathan Escoffery’s book If I Survive You is fascinating to me, because it’s somewhere between a collection of linked stories and a novel. Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, is told in four sections over the span of many centuries, around the building of this cathedral where St. Cuthbert’s body is buried. Other huge books for me in this regard are Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan.
My point is that some of the most exciting work I’ve seen in recent years comes from people who are working in shorter forms to different ends. A lot of them are technically short-story collections, but they don’t really make aesthetic sense without one another. My sense of these books is that the stories were written very intentionally to be part of one work, and I think that makes so much sense in our present moment. I could say something banal about attention spans, but it’s more than that. There’s something about the form of short stories and life on the Internet, scrolling and clicking, and the basic hypertextual experience of navigating the Internet. A book can contain many different worlds, too, without staying too long in one place.
It’s a vital time for the form. It’s equipped to do something that the big novel can’t, and there are a lot of writers doing really good work. But I’m not that smart about the necessities of the marketplace. I don’t know enough about how publishing works.
I think you’ve hit on something really interesting about the marketplace, though, which is that publishers are sometimes packaging (or maybe even disguising) short-story collections as novels-in-stories—and marketing long short stories as short novels!—in the hope that they’ll sell more copies.
I hadn’t quite connected those dots, but yeah, you’re right. There are a lot of books people are reading that contain these other forms.
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is often celebrated as the greatest novel of the century so far, but it’s essentially a collection of very long linked stories.
That’s true. I just read Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories for the first time a few years ago. The stories are all really different, but there’s this one repeating character who’s a dark and powerful figure. To me, there’s something really special and unique about the ability of a book that contains disparate things to link them in a way that strikes more than one note. When I was writing this book, I wanted to be aggressive about the variety of ideas that appeared in it. I wanted to just throw ideas out recklessly rather than take one thing and use it as the basis for a longer project just because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do. I wanted it to be a little riotous. A lot of my favorite collections of stories—or as you said, novels that contain a lot of little worlds—are doing that.
Why call this collection Beautiful Days?
The title comes from the story “Wood Sorrel House,” where the last line is “There will be beautiful days.” I had a different experience writing the book than people do reading it, because when I look at that story again, I feel like there’s a lot of prettiness in that story—the pastoral aspect of it with the lake and the forest and the mountains, and then also the bond between parent and child. There’s a lot of darkness in that story, but there’s some beauty in it, too.
I knew that I was writing a book with a lot of darkness in it, and one that was cynical in places. I started writing the stories when I was living in New York, so maybe there’s some of that big-city claustrophobia or paranoia, especially in “Trial Run.” I also think some of it comes from life on the Internet and being constantly glued to our devices, where my phone feels like a portal to a darker reality.
But all of these characters are trying to figure something out. They feel like they desperately need answers to big questions and they can’t get them, but they’re going to try—and in the trying, I think there’s a lot of hopefulness and redemption. These impenetrable mysteries are how the basic conditions of life feel to me. That’s what speculative fiction can do: help you set your sights more clearly on questions that are concrete in your life.
Originally published on Esquire US
Fifty years ago, Stephen King published Carrie, a slim volume about a bullied teenager and the violent revenge she exacts on her high school classmates. Seventy-six books later, King is arguably the most famous writer in America. Through bloodcurdling novels like It, Pet Sematary, and The Shining, the author has carved out his place as the undisputed master of horror fiction. With more than 350 million copies sold and many of his books adapted for the screen (sometimes multiple times over), King’s dark imagination is a dominant force in American culture. Now seventy-six years old, he still writes at a brisk clip from his home in Bangor, Maine. His latest, You Like It Darker, is out now.
Fame is a pain in the ass. The older you get, the more of a pain in the ass it is. But you have to realise that it comes with the territory. It’s just part of what you do.
There’s this old Spanish saying: “God says, ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’ ” That’s the case with being famous.
I knew a lot when I was seventeen. But since then, it’s been a constant process of attrition.
You can’t think of writing as an adult pursuit or anything that’s important. That’s a good way to turn into a gasbag and start to think that you’re really fucking important. You’re not. You just do your work.
I have to work every day because I have to keep it fresh. If you take a few days off, it all starts to look kind of tacky—like an old campaign poster that’s running in the rain.
It doesn’t always work. I’ve got stories that just ram up against a brick wall. They’re in my right desk drawer. I don’t look in there.
If it’s a good review, it can be dismissed. If it’s a bad review, well, then that’s something you obsess over a little bit.
The important thing about failing is that it should always be a learning experience.
When I have a good idea, I just know. It’s like if you have a bunch of cut-glass goblets set up and you’re hitting them with a spoon. Clunk, clunk, clunk. And then one goes ding.
In every marriage, after the shine is off, then you get down to the serious work of building a relationship.
You can’t let the sun go down on your anger. These all sound like fucking platitudes. They become platitudes for a reason.
Be there for your kids. Say yes. Say yes as much as you can.
What would I tell my twenty-year-old self? Stay away from dope and stay away from booze. Because you have a tendency to go too far.
I’ve been in recovery a day at a time for a long time now. All I know is what works for me: staying out of the wine aisle in Publix.
They say that you don’t go to a whorehouse to listen to the piano player, and if you hang around the barbershop, sooner or later you’re going to get your hair cut. So I try to stay away from temptation.
I like to use my imagination. I like to go for walks. I dig the world in general.
Ten per cent of my tweets are political because every now and then, I just get so irritated about something. It doesn’t change anybody’s mind, but it’s good to be able to say it. In the meetings that I go to, we say, “You have to claim your chair.” Sometimes I feel like, yeah, I have to claim my chair.
There’s this saying that if you’re not a liberal in your teens, you don’t have a heart, and if you’re still a liberal in your twenties and thirties, you don’t have a brain.
I think that, actually, if you’re a liberal in your teens, you probably don’t have a brain. And if you’re not a liberal by the time you’re in your thirties and forties, you don’t have a heart.
If you ask what I learned from my accident, it would be: Number one, stay on the sidewalk. I was walking in the country, and the guy came over the hill and hit me.
Other than that, you learn about pain. But it doesn’t do any good, because you forget. The body has a way of forgetting the trauma. I suffered a lot, and the writing helped me because it took me away. That’s probably a healthy thing. You don’t want to live your life in a defensive crouch.
I can cook fish a thousand different ways, but I’m also one hell of a breakfast cook. I make a great cheese omelet.
I’d like to be known as somebody who died merry—who did his work as best as he could and was decent to other people.
I think what people will say is “This is the scary guy—the guy who wrote the horror novels.” But I’d like to be known as somebody who was just a decent human being.
Originally published on Esquire US
Geoffrey Mak is no stranger to excess. For several years, the Chinese American art critic lived in Berlin on and off, enjoying the city’s rave culture, its queer scene, and a wide variety of drugs. He attended glamorous art fairs and openings, parties thrown by artist collectives and trend forecasters, and worked at becoming a writer. He recognised the fact, though, that within the rarefied social circles he frequented, he and others were all playing types. “I was never sure which side of the counterculture I was expected to perform,” he writes in his new essay collection, Mean Boys: A Personal History, “art critic, ad man from New York, technogoth turning looks at the club, or a foot fetishist with a kink for golden showers. I just knew that once I located my role, my ‘character,’ it was important to deviate as little as possible.”
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mak experienced his second psychotic breakdown in the span of three years, then flew back to his parents’ home in California to get help and try to heal. Yet the psychiatrists he saw couldn’t help much—they weren’t sure how to diagnose him due to his drug use. “As a junkie,” Mak writes, “I was hard for psychiatrists to take seriously, so in turn I didn’t take them seriously.” His life slowed down from the 120-140 beats per minute that characterise techno to a far more sedate pace that felt more like boredom than peace. But when Mak began attending Alcoholics Anonymous, things started to change, and he found in the programme a different kind of intensity—one that helped him. He also began to find his way back to Christianity, which he’d grown up around (his father is a minister) but had abandoned due to the evangelical persecution of LGBTQ+ people. Amid that return, he also took on a frightening project: reading and writing about the manifesto of Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings.
Mak Zoomed with Esquire to discuss how he wrote Mean Boys, the complexity of empathy, returning to his faith, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: In your author’s note, you share that you had an audience in mind when writing these essays—your friends. Friendship and its complexity is also a recurring motif within the book. What did writing for your friends allow you to do or feel as you wrote?
GEOFFREY MAK: I think writing to friends guarantees an intimacy in the very premise of the work. When you’re writing to a friend, you often want to please them, make them laugh, or interest them. Friendship is as difficult as any kind of relationship. Sometimes with the writing, I was trying to comfort; sometimes I was trying to entertain; sometimes I was trying to win back or draw someone closer to me. That’s not always the case; there are so many ways to write.
You might write to be understood or celebrated. Of course I want those things too, but I think what I really hope for is intimacy. There’s a very radical and kinky intimacy that I can have with complete strangers [through the writing]. I started a lot of these essays as Facebook notes, and I never thought they would be in a book. Now there are all these strangers reading these pieces of writing I’ve done over the years. I think it’s really cool.
One of the main threads of the book’s title essay, “Mean Boys,” is the psychology of the mass shooter. You do a close reading of the Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger’s manifesto and come to empathise with him—you never condone his actions or claim to understand them, but you empathise with aspects of his frustration, anger, and angst. What was it like, taking on this project?
Difficult. When I started writing “Mean Boys,” I didn’t know where it was going. I started with very simple pattern recognition: I saw a Lacoste logo in radically different places [such as photos of Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik] and I wondered, Why? I thought it was going to be a short essay where I just wrote about that.
And then one thing led to another, and Rodger came into the essay. We were almost the same age, and I remembered the story so intensely. I was like, Well, I can’t write about Rodger if I don’t read the manifesto. But then when I read it, there was a major discovery, which was that Rodger cared about status more than he cared about sex. I realised I needed to drop everything I was doing and follow the thread. He was just obsessed with being popular. The discovery for me was that status is not the same thing as class and identity. Rodger was half white, so he had that privilege; he was also a trust-fund kid with a lot of inherited wealth, so he had class privilege. But it didn’t translate into status. His life’s wound was that it didn’t happen the way he was told it was supposed to happen. When I discovered this, I needed to redo the whole essay.
What was your reasoning for titling the book Mean Boys?
Early on in the “Mean Boys” essay, I was writing about my brother, who’s a little bit shy and has a lot of social anxiety but is always cracking jokes. I write about him and his high school cohort and that wonderfully bitchy line where he was like, The only reason why you got elected to student government is because you’re my brother. It’s probably true! When I showed him the part about him for the first time, he was like, This is so interesting—you’re writing about mean girls except they’re mean boys. From then onward, I knew that needed to be the title. As I was working through the essays, the title took on a life of its own. I was thinking of how “mean boys” codes as queer, and how when Elliot Rodger uses the term, it’s referring to the bullies at school.
I think the “mean boy” is kind of a sexual figure. It’s complicated, and throughout the book, I’m trying to mine these sometimes queer or sadomasochistic forms of desire that are an extension of violence but also protect us from violence. Who the mean boys [of the book] are is kind of up for debate. One of my friends read it and then said to me, “I don’t think there are any mean boys in here.” Another friend said, “I think there’s only one mean boy in the book and it’s you.” What he meant is that the mean boy gets to write about everything, brings out all of these flaws in other people, and gets to have the final say.
You said the term “mean boys” is queer coded, and I agree, but—why, actually? What about it is coded queer?
The surface reading is that I take the title from Mean Girls, this beloved comedy of just bitchy girls at the lunch table, and imagine bitchy boys there instead. That’s a kind of queering. But for queer men—I think when we’re boys, we grow up attracted to something that is also physically dangerous. Maybe this is going to change in upcoming generations. I obviously didn’t go to school during the era of marriage equality, so when I was young, I desired boys, and if that desire was known, I could get beaten up, ridiculed, shoved into a locker. Desire was never divorced from fear and danger, so these were braided intensely together at a young age.
I mean, it’s mysterious how these things work, but that primal memory of wanting something that I’m afraid of.... [In the book] I write about sadomasochistic fantasies and queer intimacy later in life, and these things have a long lineage and a long life in one’s imagination and fantasies, and to restage childhood feelings of desire in the bedroom is a way of confronting it. But yeah, I do think the title “Mean Boys” makes me think of high school and the locker room and watching boys undress before PE and being so terrified that they would catch me looking.
So-called mean boys have the cachet that allows them to be mean without suffering social or status-related consequences. Do mean boys have an outsize effect on culture?
The looming mean boy over all these essays is Trump. Trump was so distressing to me: watching him wield power in this way, exerting and reinforcing power through meanness. The whole world was watching this! When a child sees things, the child repeats it—were we all going to repeat this? Was this going to be a new age of cruelty?
I do think that mean boys—some of whom aren’t even male—do kind of control the culture. With the art-world section in the title essay, I wanted to really counteract that in a way. I looked at people who are in power in this world, such as Wolfgang Tillmans or Anne Imhof or this anonymous artist that I call L, and I drew out moments of generosity in their portrayals, trying to depict a kind of power that didn’t rely on meanness, that brought out and reinforced generosity.
Sometimes we write an ideal that doesn’t yet exist, but once we write it, it does exist, and then it shapes the world. I think capitalism conditions us to think that this is the only reality, that we’re all in competition and we’re all climbing a ladder and we have to kick down the people beneath us. I think human nature is not inherently a scarcity mindset, not inherently competitive, not inherently greedy. I think it’s inherently generous, and I wanted to bring out those moments in some of these portraits.
You mentioned Rodger’s obsession with status, and in “Mean Boys” you articulate the complexity of that idea—how it’s impossible to prove or describe, but it’s nevertheless felt and acknowledged and recognised. You realise that the problem of status is political but has no political solution. How do you think we should deal with it—individually or collectively?
I think we need to talk about [status] as real. It was a painful, irreducible reality in Elliot Rodger’s life that really drove him to go where he went. Some people like to call [status] social capital, but it’s not a resource; there’s no gold standard of status. It’s unlike class and identity. It’s entirely relational, which makes it so chaotic, so slippery. But we need to start talking about it. We need to believe it’s real.
I’m always suspicious of someone who believes in the equitable distribution of identity, privilege, and capital, but they totally don’t believe in the equitable distribution of status. What if we lived our lives a little bit differently, attuned to the more equitable redistribution of status? I don’t know if that means Trump won’t get elected, but it’ll shape our personal lives. That’s all we can do. I present religion and art not as a solution but as a response to status. They don’t make the problem go away but respond to it on its own terms.
Another theme in the book is your slow return to Christianity but from a much more radical mindset than the Christianity you grew up with. Do you consider yourself a Christian now?
I do. I take it quite seriously. I don’t go to a church, but I have close Christian friends, some of whom are among the best theologians in the country. In Calvinism, there’s this concept of irresistible grace, where the grace is so urgent in your life that you just slide into it. It almost overpowers your will. It kind of felt like that [for me].
A couple of things happened. One, my father really just showed me what a Christian was capable of—the capacity for love, the refusal to close the book on what he was, who he was, and what he was capable of. This persistence of inquiry and learning and really radical humility. I mean, my father is so cool; if my father is this kind of person and he credits Christianity, then that’s something I want in my life. Second, I think most leftist radical queer people would like Christianity a lot if they simply found the right stuff. It’s actually out there: liberation theology, queer theology, the wacky stuff that ties together ancient early Christian apathetic theology with queer theory from the eighties and notions of the apocalypse with Lee Edelman’s No Future. I really gravitated to this stuff, and I found that I could find Christian traditions and theologies and histories and thinkers who grappled with the most important topics of my life.
Many of your essays revolve around the various kinds of excesses you took to when you were in Brooklyn and Berlin’s artistic milieus. Later, during your process of going through the AA steps, you come to appreciate the small mundanities—the beauty that can be found in paying attention to the same things over and over again, like the discovery to be found in the minor shifts of a techno loop. You hint at this coming change early in the book when you write that you found out “where the road of excess goes. It leads to nothing.” Clearly, your sensibilities changed over the years. How much of that was sobriety? How much was simply time passing?
Sobriety is a new way of looking at the world and also a reorientation of time. My sponsor, at the end of each day, would tell me to name three things I did that day for others. One of them was I always unloaded the dishes, period, with no expectation of reciprocation. It’s funny; it took Alcoholics Anonymous to teach me how to make my bed. I wasn’t somebody who did that, but my sponsor was like, You need to learn to make your bed every single morning. And I got into the habit, and now I do. These rituals that drove me really insane [at first] were a way of fastening attention onto the daily, the forgettable, the unremarkable.
Where do you feel that you are now in terms of your understanding of excess and mundanity? Do they have to be at odds?
I just finished this great book, With My Back to the World, a poetry collection by Victoria Chang, and it’s all about Agnes Martin’s paintings, which are just grids. I find these paintings devastatingly beautiful, and the collection is about how after the death of [Chang’s] father, she turns to these grids and finds freedom, love, and beauty in them.
I see [the simultaneity of excess and mundanity] in Agnes Martin’s paintings, like Night Sea. It’s this vast expanse of blue, and the grids are laid in gold foil. So you have this total indulgence and then complete austerity. I think this is a visual metaphor of many, many things in all of our lives. I think about the hours before my grandmother died, the hours I spent at her bedside, and I would feel so guilty checking my watch to see how much time had passed, because inadvertently I was asking, So when’s she going to die? I was bored out of my mind. It was excruciating; she wasn’t doing anything. But were those some of the most flagrantly beautiful and treasured hours of my life? Absolutely. No question about it.
