I’m not sure what pronouns to use for Lou, our first-person narrator. When it comes to gender, Lou identifies as “the human-shaped approximation of a void” and says, “I’m not a woman, but I am a daughter.” On the other hand, Lou doesn’t object (either out loud or in thinking) when other characters use she/her pronouns to refer to Lou.

Lou enjoys being mean to people who identify as male and hates police and white people. Lou also has a voice in their head that encourages them to hurt others. They wouldn’t be a very sympathetic character, except they do have a dog and care for their sick mother.

This reminds me that someone once said The Grinch wouldn’t have been a sympathetic character if he didn’t have a dog. Giving your unlikable character a dog is a simple trick to change them into someone the audience can root for. Lou is constantly picking up their dog Ripley, so I presume Ripley has some kind of disability that prevents her from jumping out of a car like a normal dog would. Ripley is endangered during the course of the novella, but the trigger warning at the beginning of the book assures readers she ends up OK, so don’t worry.

Lou goes to a rural area for work and brings their dog. They feel at home in nature, however animals and people in this area act strangely. Someone has sabotaged their truck and of course their phone doesn’t work. Lou has a masochistic fantasy early in the novella that becomes a classic case of “be careful what you wish for” as events unfold and they eventually find themself chained up in a basement.

Unfortunately, the myth of repressed memory popularized by Sigmund Freud is part of the plot. I understand how tempting it is to use repressed memory as an easy way to give a book a surprise twist, but it’s lazy writing and it also promotes pseudo-science. I realize the novella also features a monster, but everyone knows monsters aren’t real. Not everyone knows repressed memory is a myth, especially since it’s super easy to confuse false memories for recovered memories.

It’s an interesting twist that the villain is an advocate of effective altruism. How can helping other people be a bad thing? The author makes a good point that charity can be used to justify bad behavior in an “ends justify the means” sort of way. I wonder if the villain is meant to be a criticism of Sam Bankman-Fried, a leading figure in the effective altruism community who committed fraud in order to give more money to charity. This also makes me think of the trolley problem. If you can save multiple people by sacrificing one, would you do it? Wouldn’t letting multiple people die to save one be even more monstrous?

I thought it was cute that Lou had a crush on their boss in the beginning of the book. The descriptions in this book are very detailed. It feels like you’re there. Cicadas are always present and turn out to be a bit of a theme. I like when Lou points out that performing a human sacrifice in order to gain wealth is what capitalism is, it just usually isn’t so blatant. This was a nice, short read that brought up some interesting ideas.