Such a synopsis might suggest a standard folk horror tale, but Bernstein subverts the tropes of the genre to resist such simplicity, and in doing so offers a far more conflicted view of victimhood. The style is typified by her handling of the narrator’s voice. Ambiguity is a key facet of the folk horror genre, with unreliable narrators often used as plot devices or twisty gimmicks. However, the unreliability of the narrator in Study for Obedience is more nuanced and enlightening. Because it’s not that we doubt the essential truth of her status and circumstances within the novel—hers is not a project of deception—rather the tone of her recollections suggests a level of embellishment. As though, finally granted the opportunity to tell her story, the urge to exaggerate proves overwhelming. Out of a desire to better capture a wider truth perhaps, or merely a sign of an author getting carried away in the joy of the telling.

The question at the heart of Study for Obedience therefore becomes not so much whether we can believe what the narrator is telling us, rather what it says of her as a character that she tells her story in such a manner. Because again, on the surface, she might appear a familiar figure. Her relationship with her brother is exploitative. She serves as his housekeeper and personal assistant, learning the particular demands of his routine so as to provide a seamless service which extends to reading to him in the bath and even washing him. An age-old power dynamic is suggested. Masculine dominance subjugating the female. But just as the plot subverts expectation, so too does Bernstein refuse us the comfort straightforward relationships. Because though the historical systems of oppression are clearly present, she allows her characters to bend the logic of their outcomes. Like the certain delight the narrator takes in what appear to be demeaning tasks. As she admits at one point, “I did like to dress him.”

The youngest of many siblings, the narrator has existed within a state of servitude to her siblings since before she could speak. “I attended to their every desire,” she states in the opening, “smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine.” This sense of exchange is important to the novel, and slowly revealed to be bidirectional. For the narrator comes to realise that just as the desires of the oppressor are imprinted on the oppressed, so too does the suffering of the exploited worm its way into the oppressor. A strange transfer which upends power dynamics as we know them, and allows the persecuted a more ambivalent image.

The idea is encapsulated by the Paula Rego quote which serves as an epigraph to the novel. “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” This duality dawns upon the narrator and she embraces the contradiction. The subservient actions she performs for her brother—dressing and bathing and brushing him—come to feel almost like weapons she wields over him. Her epiphany is that the victim is more complicated than we might realise. That they can have strange agencies, even power, within even the worst treatment.

The opposite proves true of the narrator’s brother. A man who had “always despised weaklings, detested victims, found self-pity, personal grief and collective mourning abhorrent,” he represents the antithesis of narrator, not only disliking weakness but finding himself drawn to cruelty in its presence. “If he himself had to choose between resentment and self-pity, he would choose the former any day, any day,” as the narrator states. To see weakness in another is to be reminded of his own, to be dragged at some subconscious level towards the belittled state of victimhood, so better to hate it, lash out in disgust. But this proves his undoing, because violence begets suffering, meaning a vicious circle emerges. Weakness provokes cruelty, cruelty causes weakness, and so the wheel turns.

The brother’s gradual deterioration across the second half of the novel is symbolic of this phenomenon. The idea exploitation is a mutually destructive force. That the powerful will be infected by a rot regardless of how much they stand to gain from the relationship. To enter such a bargain, to force another to be obedient for your benefit, is to destroy yourself slowly, invoke a curse that cannot be broken. Violence will always bend back upon itself to decimate the hand which holds the whip. Just as the narrator’s obedience becomes its own clandestine form of agency, so too does the brother’s dominance transmogrify into a curious form of subjugation. As if, in providing every demanded service and luxury, she helps him inadvertently dismantle himself, piece by bloody piece.

The gendered reading of this sibling relationship is obvious, and against the backdrop of a wary townsfolk it becomes an allegory for xenophobic distrust too. But as the narrator’s background reveals itself in small flashes, the meaning extends to history. For she belongs to “an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits,” and her new home is revealed to be the site of this persecution. The spectre of the Holocaust haunts the novel, a ghostly echo within every interaction, a shadow puppet on the far wall. The ultimate form of taming is to eradicate, but any power attempting genocide, that is attempting to create an absence, is doomed to internalise this absence and be consumed from within.

Appearing to understand this on some level, the narrator embraces this destructive potential and fear it instils. Several scenes see her enter public spaces despite the clear hostility towards her, and she even takes to fashioning strange effigies to leave around the town as though to further provoke suspicion. The animosity she faces becomes its own form of validation, and she positions her ostracized status as a kind of social necessity. “I sensed dimly the outline of complex networks of exchange and relation that structured the society one lived in,” she explains, “structures that in certain cases required the presence, or more appropriately the exclusion, of a particular individual or object, to enable the cohesion of the whole. One played one’s part, everyone did.”

Thus, Bernstein’s protagonist settles as neither a victim or bogeyman, but instead in the murky middle ground. The central achievement of a novel where the subjective nature of the narrator’s voice, be it unreliability or embellishment, forces the reader to question the apparently objective image of victimhood so often put forward. Why must we demand our victims be innocent, and what does it say of us? Can the dominant order of the world be challenged from within? “Did it follow, then, that I had achieved some measure of grace after all?” as the narrator ponders:

That, after all this time, and completely unbeknownst to myself, I had passed into the role of a teacher, a kind of spiritual guide, who own motions of the spirit were so powerful as to be able to influence the thought and action of others? No, no, surely not […] Nothing could have induced me to take on a leadership role of any kind, I was a faithful and perennial servant, and yet, and no one could have found the situation more impossible that I did, it seemed to me that my obedience had itself taken on a kind of mysterious power. And if I had been granted this power, by some grace, against my wishes, must I not then make use of it in some way?

Study For Obedience is out now via Granta Books.

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The end of the story comes in the opening paragraphs. The jilted fiancé of the car’s owner knocks the door, asking for the vehicle back. The new convenience closing as quickly as it opened, a thing sealed off to be remembered fondly and perhaps pined for. The pessimist might be resentful of such an experience, but Johal chooses a different direction. As though the situation was proof things are given just as readily as they are taken away.

Echoes of this feeling resonate across Gurnaik Johal’s stories. Characters who have been denied so much—be it the luxury of a car or the immigrant’s sense of belonging—living and hoping in spite of everything. What results are tales less interested in definite statements on identity and history, but more the possibility within circumstances as they have been dealt. Be that making the best of what is present or refusing to accept the present as the only available thing.

A subtle interconnection threads the pieces, allowing Johal to create and then subvert expectations within his own individual characters, to further widen their sense of possibility on the page. We Move might span half the globe and multiple generations, but the same openness to joys both future and past shine through all the same.

We Move is out now via Serpent’s Tail, including a new paperback edition.

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You play as Wade, a computer repairman sent to a job in a vacant office building. Once inside, the door swings shut behind you, and you are forced to navigate empty corridors and deserted rooms in order to find a way out. This seemingly mundane beginning soon gives way to weirdness, as Wylesol wrings every drop of menace from the strange liminal hell-space of an abandoned office block. It’s a landscape of endless repeating corridors and identikit offices plucked from a nightmare, hostile to any form of humanity despite the pretence of water coolers, ergonomic furniture and the bright corporate colours that adorn every corridor.

Such uncanny environs are Wylesol’s forte, both in his graphic novels and work as an illustrator. There’s a weird blur of the physical and digital inherent in his signature style, where vector illustrations are laser printed and then scanned back into the computer. A collision of the real and unreal which ultimately questions any distinction between the two. Previous books have explored haunted hospitals (Ghosts, etc) and a battle with the legions of hell via a demonic computer virus (Internet Crusader), and it is clear from early on that 2120 is a horror story too. The innards of the building are impossibly large and initial attempts to make a quick escape become something of a philosophical quest into its depths. To say more on the plot would be to stray into spoiler territory, but fans of the eeriness of The House of Leaves, Silent Hill or David Lynch at his weirdest will revel in the opportunity to lose themselves within.

2120 is out now via Avery Hill Publishing. Get it from their online shop.

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To further complicate matters, Youssef keeps a secret of his own. He has an additional “brother” that only he can see, a strange, shapeshifting combination of imaginary friend, familiar and mental illness that feeds on memories and information. This left-field narrative choice illustrates the multilayered and miscellaneous nature of Khalid’s writing. What begins as a domestic novel morphs into a mystery, a magical realist fable and a revenge thriller, all the while making broad and often poignant observations on themes of family, faith, LGBTQ+ persecution, the USA and the Middle East.

If there is a criticism of the novel its that it perhaps bites off more than it can chew. The strongest sections are the early ones, where Khalid captures New York in all of its dense, contradictory magic. When the narrative zooms out and moves elsewhere (including into Imam Salim’s past and a Neom-style futuristic city in Saudi Arabia), some of the evocative detail and poetic lyricism is lost. But aspiration is hardly a failing, and you certainly can’t accuse Khalid of making easy, audience-pleasing choices. An author willing and able to take risks is becoming an ever-rarer beast in contemporary fiction, and Zain Khalid is a welcome reminder of their value.

Brother Alive is out now via Grove Press.

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Rooted in the futility of existence at the end of civilisation, The Doloriad is brave enough to mostly forgo plot in favour of atmosphere, the vibe shifting from unbearably oppressive to almost dream-like. But there is a story to follow. One centring on Dolores, one of the younger offspring, legless and pale and grublike, who is sent away as a marriage offering to a mysterious group of others who may be real, delusion or lie. When Dolores unexpectedly returns alone, the Matriarch’s grip on the community begins to loosen and what little order existed dissolves.

But it is Williams’s intricate prose which stands apart, and the resulting heavy, listless atmosphere which settles over everything. A tone warm, fetid and claustrophobic, embodied by scenes in the makeshift schoolroom where both pupils and teacher drift off to sleep during the latter’s rambling sermons. Even moments of extreme violence elicit little response from this broken family, as if nature’s unthinking cruelty has begun to sprout in their souls in the same manner plants and fungi have reclaimed what were once buildings parcelled off for human existence.

Odd, shocking, sometimes surreal (wait for the sitcom segments) and often beautiful despite itself, The Doloriad is a much needed poisonous antidote to the identikit khaki and rubble of most post-apocalyptic fiction. You won’t find any simple moral arcs here, no Hail Mary hopes of salvation. For Williams’s vision of the end times paints the remaining people as maggots writhing around in the rotten remains of our world.

The Doloriad is out now via Dead Ink Books (UK), and will be released next month in the US via MCD x FSG Originals.

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In his latest novel, Pure Life, Eugene Marten takes us beyond Jelonnek’s tape into the life of Number Nineteen himself. First with an extended prologue which condenses the slow rise and swift fall of an athlete on the cusp of glory into less than fifty pages, then through the aftermath that now represents his life. Like a veteran returned home with no way to communicate what has been taken from him, Nineteen is a man crippled—physically, mentally, spiritually—by the very thing which gave him purpose, losing his fame and family with equally undignified haste. His too-often battered head loses chunks of time to blackness, yet is somehow entirely submerged in the past. As though there exists a threshold inside of a man, be it of triumph, pain or brotherhood, beyond which there are only degrees of mourning.

Alarmed by his deteriorating health, Nineteen heads to the Mosquito Coast of Honduras for non-FDA-approved treatment, a Hail Mary throw which might make him whole again. But as with so many promised miracles, there’s no substance behind the dream, just an empty vacuum which quickly sucks Nineteen toward the brutal truths of existence. There is no rewinding now.

What follows is a journey into the rainforest to rival Heart of Darkness or Paul Bowles’s ‘Distant Episode’, a nightmare told from a curdled concoction of colonialism, capitalism and masculinity that readers familiar with Marten’s work will have been half-expecting all along. But as with his previous novels, Marten is too astute to let any sense of commentary overshadow the immediacy of the writing, foregoing easy moralising in favour rhythm and feel. The essence of Pure Life lies within this reptilian drive of the prose. Because for better or worse, the journey allows Nineteen to rediscover what it means to feel alive in the purest sense. Pure life is the athlete in motion, is violence, is the heat and noise of the jungle itself.

Pure Life is out now via Strange Light.

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The two parts of the collection are presented backwards, with Campfires of the Dead—Christopher’s debut originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989 and now out of print—preceded by The Living, an unpublished collection of work written between 1990 and 2004, before Christopher’s untimely death a few years later. Much of the older work was written under the tutelage of Gordon Lish, a fact it wears nakedly and mostly for the better (if occasionally for the worse). The newer experiments further (a four-story meta-story told through titles and printed receipts?), and manages to be at once warmer and more cool. But ultimately both are linked in their affinity for people existing on the edge of things. Be it the dumpster diving protagonist of ‘Lost Dogs’, the third wheel chicken sexer turned cow manicurist of ‘The Careerist’ or the driver and passenger sharing a flirtatious heart-to-heart via the mirror of a bullet-pocked taxi cab.

Stories plagued by the pain of life, and by the desire for it all the worse. “There is, I know, loneliness in this world so great that you can see IT and hear IT in the ticking hand of a watch,” he writes in ‘Hunger’, where a death row killer writes to the cook of his final meal. “ALL THAT, then how it was again when our time together got almost too good.”

Campfires of the Dead and The Living is out now via 11:11 Press.

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Enter one of academia’s favourite buzzwords. The rhizome. Unlike the dichotomous model of trees, rhizomatic plants and fungus grow in all directions with no central point. “A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles,” Deleuze and Guattari explained. An interlinked structure without a central beginning or end. “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.”

Jeff Chon’s debut novel, Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun, applies the rhizomatic model to our conspiratorial age. The narrative takes inspiration from the Comet Ping Pong incident, where a man drove from North Carolina to Washington D.C. armed with a semi-automatic rifle to attack a supposed Democratic Party child-sex ring operating from the basement of a pizzeria, though Chon adds further layers of complexity and irony to delve into the guts of such events. His protagonist Scott Bonneville walks into the Pizza Galley Family Fun Center and foils a would-be shooter—the titular Good Guy With a Gun—but he hadn’t arrived in search of the perfect slice. Bonneville was at the restaurant to carry out his own attack, motivated by a web of conspiracy theories and urban legends which, fertilised by our good friend toxic masculinity, manifest as a violent delusion both highly personal and strangely familiar.

Because in his own mind, Bonneville isn’t a conspiracy theorist. The moon landings certainly occurred, Earth’s roundness is not up for debate. You don’t have to be a card-carrying wacko to care about kids being exploited or kidnapped across the country. A little bit of your own research unveils clear links to law enforcement, schools and religious groups. Is it so wild to care about suffering kids? Then there is shady stuff involving Wall Street and the Carlyle Group, and the Bushes and Clintons, and the CIA and J.D. Salinger and Lee Harvey Oswald and Adrenochrome and and and…

“Conspiracy… is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” wrote Frederic Jameson. “A degraded figure of the total logic of late capital,” or, what he describes elsewhere “a degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” But rather than representing a simplified fairy-tale version of global systems, the contemporary culture of conspiracy theory has morphed into its own impossible totality. In attempting to explain or reject the endless web of information, conspiracy theories come to represent a perfect example of the form. A rhizomatic structure key to their longevity and persistence. When the Pizzagate shooter pleaded guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon, Infowars‘ Alex Jones issued a statement acknowledging Comet Ping Pong was not involved in human trafficking. But the Democrat sex ring story was not demolished by the affirmation. Rather the Pizzagate conspiracy mutated to encompass the new developments, and now looks quaint compared with the scope and influence of QAnon. Take an axe to the trunk of a tree and every branch will wither and die. But sever a fungal rhizome and no such catastrophe occurs. The damage remains entirely local, the wider network no less capable of growth. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari, “but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.”

Chon brings this concept to life stylistically, circling the incident at the restaurant and providing glimpses into every occurrence and character which played some role in it, no matter how tangential. Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun comes to represent its own interlinked structure. The narrative is not linear. There is no present per se, just a series of scenes before, during and after the precipitating event. Vignettes presented out of order, and themselves prone to flashing back to some previous scene or revealing an as yet unrealised future. A story, for all of its male vanity and violent fervour, with no final villain or point of blame.

“You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything.” Deleuze and Guattari could have been writing about Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun here. “Formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject—anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions.” And seeing as they, like Chon, were writing about this horrible world we have created, in a funny way they were.

Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun is out now via Sagging Meniscus Press. Get it from your local indie bookshop, or failing that Bookshop.org.

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What follows is an odd and haunting novel which holds its intentions close to its chest. With its grey skies and thick mud, the prose is rooted in the Irish land, but this realism is challenged by both the cryptic narrative and the half-deranged characters at its heart. The short chapters accentuate this sense, acting like jump cuts between scenes and lending the feel of a dream. The result is peculiar but stronger for it, addressing the concerns of twenty-first century rural living but evoking a far older relationship to the land and the people who work it. So though Dennis’s style slots in alongside contemporary works like Cynan Jones’s The Dig or Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, it does so while maintaining an unsettling strangeness that is entirely its own.

The Beasts They Turned Away is out via Epoque Press.

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Bestiary is out now via Harvill Secker (UK) and Oneworld (US). Buy it from your local independent bookshop or Bookshop.org.

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