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| "For the Love of God" by Damien Hirst |
It takes a lot for words on the page to become sweat on my palms, but that's exactly what's been happening lately. Is it just me, or is literary fiction kind of disgusting these days?
Exhibit A: this summer I listened to The Compound, a 2025 book from Aisling Rawle. The central premise is that nineteen attractive young people find themselves marooned in a desert home and starring in a popular reality TV show. They compete for prizes—ranging from diamond earrings to doors for the house—and each other's affection. The Compound is the blackest of dark comedies, a book-length joke about reality television voyeurism and the vapidness that infects the entire genre. The story feels filthy—there are extensive descriptions of what it feels like to be deprived of food and water, and of a dirty house that remain unclean to the point of vermin infestation. There is violence and injuries (although, surprisingly, very little sexual violence), and a pervasive feeling of desperation that encompasses the physical, emotional, and spiritual lives of the characters. While I found it compulsive—I listened to all 9 hours of it in three days—I also found it repulsive.
This reading experience came on the heels of the Earthseed books, which I read this spring. I had read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in my undergraduate, and periodically revisited it in the decades since. I had never read its sequel, Parable of the Talents, before this year. Both tell a story of social collapse and the flailing attempts to rebuild it, focused on Lauren Olamina and her emerging religion that preaches "God is change." Olamina's mission is thwarted in the second book, when her commune is captured and her flock is subject to slavery, rape, and murder. It's an intense read, highly focused on the physical sensations of abuse and subjugation. I found myself reading ahead, trying to discern if and when it would end, before wading through. The Earthseed books are written to echo the experience of enslaved Black people in America, making the point that it could happen again. It was hard to read.
There are books that I have avoided specifically because I knew they would dive into this gritty milieu. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood continues the story she first explored in The Handmaid's Tale, a book that I read twice—once in my early 20s, when I thought it was interesting, and again when my child was a baby, and I understood it more deeply as a horror story. I've avoided The Testaments, despite the fact that it won the Booker Prize, because I simply could not commit to cruelty described in award-winning detail. I feel the same way about Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh, who writes books such as My Year of Rest. That book has been raved about as containing some of the most unlikable characters you might ever encounter on the page—a recommendation that does not compel me.
This is a strange evolution; as a younger person, my favourite storyteller was Stephen King, and he was wild with the grit and gore. He devotes pages to the stuff, lavishly describing a shambling undead body or an strained sexual encounter, sparing no detail on what exactly oozed from where. Did I find it hard to read? Well, I don't want to revisit it as an adult, that's for sure. But there was also a wicked pleasure in the whole affair, and he wrote with a moral compass that generally allowed the Good Guys to vanquish and the Bad Guys to get theirs—extensively, splashily described.
I can still tolerate some ass-kicking: I motored through Dungeon Crawler Carl this summer, a book that ignores old-fashioned things like "character development" in favour of gleeful fight scenes with BDSM boars. Was it literature? Eh. Was it fun? Absolutely. But Dungeon Crawler Carl's stakes are on par with a slasher movie or a sitcom: rather than rubbing our noses in the filth, we are entertained by it.
It's probably no coincidence that the books that traffic the most highly in this crumbs-in-the-bedsheets feeling are dystopian literary fiction—a genre that transforms physical filth into a metaphor for spiritual decay. It's one thing to have a yucky fight scene; it's quite another to clock a character's willingness to engage in disgusting behaviour as the decline of her emotional centre. Harder still is torture and punishment as a mirror to what marginalized people—women, queer people, people of colour—have endured throughout history.
We are used to thinking of dystopias as something that happens after a schism or an apocalypse, but these books are more likely to explore a future in which we have simply failed to save ourselves. In our regular, everyday lives, we're facing down fascism, environmental collapse, hollow entertainment, the pull of smart technology, malignant AI, alienation, and ennui. I think that's why these books feels so gritty and so immediate. The narratives of these novels are not conditions imposed on us by aliens, foreign governments, or the plague. These are our own unwashed sheets, our own fake friendships, extrapolated with a light touch, and put to the page.
After my kid was born, I found that I could no longer tolerate horror media. I was already so on edge and primed for threat detection, that inviting the stress of a scary story in was not available to me. I sought out ease and lightness because that's what I needed—my own personal life was erupting so badly that I couldn't process any additional pain or suffering. Instead, I cultivated feel-good media: television, movies, and books that were not frightening or stressful. I revelled in stories that leaned the other way: solarpunk stories, sitcoms, fantasy novels, light memoirs. When I was raw, those stories were a balm. After a while, they became a habit. I had to reintroduce the dark stuff gradually, pulling back when I needed to. A well-balanced reading diet includes both darkness and light, grime and glitter, suffering and triumph.
Today, I'm not a total Pollyanna. The gift of literary fiction is the ability to explore those dark, disgusting actions and urges without having to actually enact them. We can be messy in our reading lives in a way that would ruin us in reality. The news since Trump's first election has felt overwhelming—wars, pandemics, AI girlfriends, MMA fights on the White House Lawn—leading to a feeling that dystopian fiction doesn't feel altogether fictional.
I have found this reading experience to be confronting. I still recoil from the grime: it's just so gross, even fictionalized. And it's meant to be gross, to be confrontational, to make us pull back. Are these books a warning? A threat? Or a vision of the future that comes from our own present? I guess I'll have to keep reading to find out.
