They, Kay Dick’s 1977 novella, is a quick and easy read. It’s also a disturbing story which was pretty much ignored when it was first published. A literary agent came across a copy in a charity shop and that’s ultimately how it came to be republished in 2022.

They dislike any form of individuality, for example artists, musicians, writers, the unmarried, the childless, and consequently they destroy paintings, books, poetry etc. They also engage in vandalism, encourage their children to be cruel to animals, urinate in public, and are suspicious of anyone who lives alone.

The novella’s unnamed narrator, and their companions, are trying to retain their identities and creative impulses against this oppressive backdrop of unrelenting threat.

They is a little confusing and incoherent. The story is told via a number of episodes which are not always obviously related to each other. This technique, perhaps intentionally, makes the action feel at a remove. There are a lot of unanswered questions. Why are the children so cruel? Why are the artists so indistinguishable? Why is art and creativity such a threat? That said, the pervasive sense of increasing dread and danger is palpable.

This unsettling vibe of creeping dread, and the many provocative questions the story raises, would make this novella an interesting choice for a book group discussion.

I really like the old books being reissued for new audiences. I particularly loved Sara Gran’s Come Closer which was one of my favourite books of 2021.

I read this also because of the forward by Carmen Maria Machado, one of my favourite writers (though of course I read that after finishing).

They definitely lives up to its subtitle of “a sense of unease” and I felt it was a book about feeling rather than plot. For such a short book I found it strangely hard work, taking me a few days to read. I struggled to follow the plot and all the characters and I couldn’t figure out what the “rules” were.

I found it quite confusing and challenging, but definitely a book with atmosphere.

3 stars

Introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer.

But as their neighbours are gleaned by military surveys, 'cured - of identity', desensitised in retreats, They make it easier to forget ... Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick's They is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece.

I have read so many blurbs and reviews and even the blinking book and I STILL have no idea what I read or what this book is about!!!!

I know I am supposed to know what it is about and I know what it should be about but I have NO IDEA WHAT IT IS ABOUT!!!! Maybe ‘They’ have got to me!!!! I’m disturbed!

#bookreviewsbymrsc #they #kaydick #bookreviews #bookstagram #instabooks #classicfiction

"They" is an odd, and oddly compelling, novella. It's written simply, the story is simple, the characters fairly basic... And it all works beautifully! For me, part of the charm of this book is what isn't written. It could easily have been double the page count, but would have lost far more than the reader gains. One for the re-read shelf.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

Another great additions to the Faber Editions. They is a short, deeply unsettling story about a society that is being broken apart by a totalitarian regime. Art, culture, and communication is dissuaded and destroyed in increasingly violent ways. Our nameless narrator tries to find their places on the fringes while retaining their identity. Quietly terrifying.

They by Kay Dick is not a new novella; in fact it was originally published in 1977 and then, due to low sales, promptly went out of print. It was rediscovered when a literary agent happened upon an old copy in a charity shop, took a liking to it and set things in motion for it to be republished in 2022.

‘Destruction doesn’t count. One can always create again.’

I was really excited by the premise of They - the unnamed narrator and their friends are trying to avoid being stripped of their identity by a group known only as ‘they’. ‘They’ dislike any form of individuality - artists, musicians, writers, the unmarried, the childless. ‘They’ destroy paintings, books, memories of composing, force people to live in group retreats and open-plan communities. Anything to remove any individual aspects of one’s personality.

‘Can we go on creating for ourselves? Without any contact with the outside world?’

The novella raises some intriguing questions - if we couldn’t share our creations with the outside world, would we continue to create? This draws an interesting parallel with our current need to incessantly share our ideas, writing, opinions and art with the internet (yes, I realise that’s what I’m doing right now!). If we didn't share these with others, would we feel the need to even form our opinions or create our art in the first place? Is the creation or the reaction most important? And if literature and the arts existed only in memory, how long would they last before we also lost the skill of composing, of storytelling, of painting?

Although the reader knows that ‘they’ are out to destroy signs of individuality, we don’t know why they take who or what they take - the narrator, for example, manages to remain living alone, and some inscriptions from her books are taken one by one but the books are allowed to remain (at least to start with). The amount of unknown information creates a constant atmosphere of uneasiness and a sense of dread each time ‘they’ are around.

Grief for lost love is the worse offence, indictable. It suggests love has value, understanding, generosity, happiness.

However, although there is that background hum of fear, I found that the storyline didn’t capture my attention as much as I expected it to. I think this is because there was just too much left unknown about the group and what happens when ‘they’ take someone. Children in the book appear to be evil, devoid of feeling, but were they born this way, or did the new way of the world make them this way? I also found that the writing was slightly stilted, with too many short sentences, which left me feeling detached from it.

A major issue for me was that the characters we were following along with the narrator were meant to be those who had escaped the group. However, the characters were barely described - we basically knew their names and maybe their art - making them almost indistinguishable from each other. I had to keep flicking back to see if we had already met a character - and these were supposed to be the ones who had managed to retain their individuality. It’s ironic

Overall, in a book market saturated with dystopia, it’s not one that will be particularly memorable for me. Idea: excellent, execution: average.

They is a republished 'lost' dystopian, than was originally published in 1977. It is a subtly terrifying novel; sparse and ambiguous in its prose. It feels modern, like it is reinventing the genre. Some may struggle with the lack of world building, but I loved the fact that it left me with more questions than it did answers

They, subtitled A Sequence of Unease, is a strange little novella first published in 1977 and now reissued by Faber Books. Its author, Kay Dick, was a bisexual intellectual who wrote fiction as well as literary biographies, reviews and journalistic pieces. Her background must surely have shaped the concerns raised in this novella.

They is set during an unspecified time period (although, likely meant to be a contemporary one) in which England is slowly but surely being taken over by a class of loutish anti-intellectuals who use violent bullying tactics to eradicate the arts. They go around the country burning books, destroying sculptures and paintings and generally stifling all attempts at creativity through acts of torture. But the agenda of this philistine group is not limited to attacking the arts. They also engage in wanton vandalism, encourage their children to be cruel to animals and urinate against public buildings, and look askance at persons who prefer to live alone (and who might therefore be tempted to think individually).

The novella’s narrative approach is a strange and potentially confusing one. Although written in the first person, we are told very little about the (unnamed) narrator except that the narrator (He? She? They?) appears to be a writer and moves in artistic circles. The story is split into a number of vignettes which do not clearly follow one another. Indeed, at times I even wondered whether the narrator was changing from one chapter/section to another although repeated references to the narrator’s dog suggest otherwise. Although on the one hand this detached style makes it difficult to feel empathy with the characters, it does contribute very effectively to the strong sense of increasing danger and impending dread. Dick taps into genre fiction to achieve her results. Thus, They is a clear example of dystopian fiction, but it also has echoes of the horror genre in its description of the bucolic landscapes of England in the grips of an oppressive, suffocating threat.

They reminded me somewhat of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men (referenced by Carmen Maria Machado in her brief but insightful introduction to this Faber edition) as well as some of the more “political” of J.B. Priestley’s weird fiction. But it is also very much its own thing, a disturbing little book which was (unsurprisingly) misunderstood on its first publication and now making a deserved return to print.

They is a lost dystopian novella, first published in 1977, about the suppression of identity and art, as a mysterious 'they' start to curtail freedoms to stop non-conformity. Subtitled 'a sequence of unease', They moves through a number of scenes, connected but not entirely, probably with the same unnamed, genderless narrator, to show the eerie dread of this new Britain, the horror of what you might lose and how people's selves might be taken from them.

This edition has been republished by Faber with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado, which helpfully positions the book in its time and gives a sense of what to look out for. The atmosphere is very much the "unease" of the subtitle, an eerie pastoral vision, like a dystopia for the Arts and Crafts movement, and as Machado points out in the introduction, you shouldn't think yourself definitely not part of "them", whoever they are. The novella explores this complicity, this taking of identity (after all, we barely know the characters, and hardly the narrator, if the narrator is one person) and the physical taking of both artworks and the means, both in terms of body and object, of making them.

I found this a subtly terrifying book that asks more questions than it answers, and shows that dystopia as a genre doesn't have to always be about very obvious comparisons and worldbuilding, but instead something creeping and ominous. It feels a bit like it should be an old 70s BBC drama, but it is also very interesting how well it works reading it today, maybe because of the ambiguity and sparseness of it.

2.5 rounded down

One of the series of "Faber Editions", a series they describe as "dedicated to radical literary voices from across the world". Having read and enjoyed the first of this series (Mrs Caliban) I was curious to check out They, which is touted as a dystopian classic.

The novella is structured as a series of short chapters featuring different characters (often creatives) whose lives are impacted upon by the eponymous "they", a group of individuals who have a sinister but vague background presence and impact on the lives of the protagonists of these individual stories/scenes.

I enjoyed a couple of the stories later in the book but found this just too slight and with too little world-building to fully engage with it. This was probably very ahead of its time when it was first published but unfortunately it only served to remind me of examples of this type of fiction (I Who Have Never Known Men) which worked better.

They don’t like you!

A strange, unsettling novella, containing a series of short tales interlinked in theme: an anonymous group, never named, never individualised, terrorises poets, artists, readers, people who live alone. Almost a study in paranoia – did you ever feel that someone has been in your house, has removed something special to you, a book, a picture? Mostly sinister, occasionally brutally violent, the tales obliquely register the transformation of ‘them’ from vigilante gangs to a government with legislative powers consistently victimising the artists, the cultured, the free-thinkers of society. Of its time, rather dated, not unlike the fiction of Keith Roberts, both in style, interlinked stories, and in tone, angry and sinister, if not downright paranoid.

Switching as a metronome from cosy nature English countryside depictions to the most cruel things people can do to each other. The sense of unease and constant threat is very well done but the components of the book don't necessarily add up to a complete novel
Destruction doesn’t count. One can always create again.

The foreword by Carmen Maria Machado gives a lot away, but is also essential, since They is not very accessible with its unnamed narrator and the vagueness of an Kazuo Ishiguro novel like The Buried Giant (with the sadness of Never Let Me Go pervading the book).
The Memory Police also definitely comes to mind, with the arts slowly retreating from Britain. Society is pervaded by unnamed crowds who hunt on artists, not only destroying their work but also mutilating them when there is any case of resistance. This brings interesting questions of one is still an artist without the ability to work (If we lack choice we lack everything), and if destruction can actually undo an act of creativity (It can’t all be destroyed. Some of it will remain for those we come after us.)

Living with a sword of Damocles, full of tranquility and sunbathing, hide near inconceivable cruelty and violence against art. The reasons for this crusade are unclear, as is the society at large. Some semblance of explanation is provided when the artist muse among themselves: We represent danger. Non-conformity is an illness. We’re possible sources of contagion.
There are undefined centers were especially egregious individuals are sent of to, in towers without any windows. People are also sometimes brainwashed:
They let her out. Cured - of identity

TV's are in every home instead of books, broadcasting the majority view, travel permits being required and no privacy, with things disappearing at seemingly random from homes. It's a scary world Kay Dick paints in this book. Despite the sometimes shocking scenes of cruelty there is a crystalline sense of nature as a answer to what humans can do, of small kindness that bind people together despite everything. In the end it doesn't make the book hopeful, but it's definitely a classic in the vein of 1984 while being completely different. Hence 3.5 stars rounded down, due to its rather fragmented nature and lack of details on the world, counterbalanced by beautiful imagery, and at times, sentences:

Like a sparrow deprived of a mate who continues his courting song, thereby attracting the bird of prey, I became insensitive to danger.

With few details at first, we feel a sense of dread in the opening pages of They. This continues as we get more details and slowly understand that the titular They are so frightening in their actions because of a perceived idea that they're following some sort of rules and their actions are controlled not born of passion. However, they're also inscrutable to a degree that makes them hard to predict.

Overall this is a well-written and clear-eyed look at the us versus them feeling of artists and non-artists carried to a startling end point.

My thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I've picked this one up because of this edition's introduction by Carmen Maria Machado, an author I really enjoy reading and whom I recently had the pleasure to interview. Her foreword is just as good as anticipated, especially her thoughts on dystopias, a genre that, as we currently see, can easily be instrumentalized (no, the state telling you you should get vaccinated is not an Orwellian nightmare, Karen, now go get that f*** shot, I want my life back, you idiot!!! - sorry, I'm digressing). Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed by the novella itself, the rather stiff language and the multitude of characters that mostly aren't portrayed with a sufficient degree of detail or specificity, so that they remain stock characters - that might have been intended on Dick's part, but it didn't help the reading experience.

The plot is rather enigmatic: We meet a group of people working in the arts, but their world is threatened by "them", creatures who hate art, the open display of emtions, people who live alone, well, non-conformity or strong independent personalities in general. "They" set out to confiscate and destroy the expression of human creativity in the form of novels, paintings, music etc., they brutally discipline or kill offenders and terrorize people into conforming to their ideas. You guessed it: The central questions here are about the meaning of art, the functions of its creation and reception, the relationship between artist and recipient.

This could all make for a fascinating read, especially as the story dips its feet into horror, but I have to admit that I wasn't intrigued - the text is partly brutal, but bloodless in the metaphorical sense. The nine chapters could also be read as nine interlinked short stories, which, together with the roughly outlined characters, pulls the text apart. While "they", as the point of the novella demands, are no more than an anonymous mass that keeps on growing in numbers, the characters that we should get to know also aren't that defined. Even the narrator remains mysterious: They are apparently a writer (or does the narrative voice sometimes shift? hmmm...), we know nothing more about their topics, or gender (this aspect can clearly be seen as daring for the time), or age, or backstory, etc.

Beware though: I think this is a case of "it's not you, it's me". Apparently, Kay Dick was a bisexual intellectual socialite in the mid-20th century who stirred things up, and this is her lost masterpiece. The story wasn't for me though.

Vision? Prophecy?
About the future? About the present?
Simple words, sentences.
The lyric, the complexity and beauty of the thoughts are gone.
They tell us what we can think of, what is the law and what is the society.
Only we have responsibilities.
Only their society exists. Our society is a thing of the past.
The individual is dangerous, a source of disease, of infection. The community is good where everything is the same, safe, conform.

The writer’s vision for the dystopian future in 1977, which has now become a sad reality. Simple, stripped-down words come together into a mosaic-like image that amplifies fear, terror. In 1977, she could only have imagined how this terror would come to fruition, but today we can clearly see the new ideas and isms by which this dystopia is created. We still have an ideal, beautiful picture of how to live our lives in a beautiful, meaningful way, but the development of the global state, the Western culture, the social media dictatorially gray it out and conform it.
The language of the book is simple, yet difficult to understand, and almost allegorically fits the content. Behind the pictures of the seemingly idyllic life there is fear and dread.

In the book, the figures of terror are not filled with life, they form a dark, shapeless mass, so in fact, everyone can fill them with their own thoughts and fears. That is why the book can become a dark dystopian reality of the present, and within that, of every individual.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this great book. I hope it opens the eyes of many people and helps them understand the processes that govern our current world.

Kay Dick’s newly-resurrected novella They depicts a sinister society governed by pervasive, malign forces. First published in 1977, it's reissued here with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado and endorsements from a host of writers including Claire-Louise Bennett, Eimear McBride, Emily St. John Mandel and Lauren Groff. It’s billed as dystopian fiction but I thought it often had the flavour of folk horror with its monstrous, roaming tribes, forcing their targets into compliance, first by stealth and then through acts of appalling, ritualistic cruelty. The date’s unspecified but the landscapes are recognisably English, the descriptions of the sea and the countryside inhabited by Dick’s nameless narrator recall the Downs and the Sussex coast where Dick lived out her final years. There’s no overarching explanation for the world trapping the narrator, its features can only be pieced together through their experiences. It’s ruled over by groups known only as “they”, these have uncertain status, at first, "they" seem like a mass movement defined only by what it hates, but as the narrative unfolds there are suggestions of a more ordered, bureaucratic system. “They” single out people living alone as well as artists, writers, craftspeople, anyone who stands out from the ordinary, hell-bent on destroying books, paintings, love letters, any/all expressions of creativity or deep personal bonds.

At times Dick’s depiction of the terrifying “they” made me think of the philistine masses so feared by intellectuals from Virginia Woolf onwards. Their insistence on installing television in every house, building vast concrete estates, blasting the streets with loud music might be viewed as an expression of Dick’s resistance to a changing world, mass media, mass consumption – in their infancy in the 1970s but increasingly influential. But there’s also a sense of despair at other systems focused on ensuring conformity: excess of emotion’s discouraged, the grieving are taken to grief towers out of sight, the eccentric locked away to be cured, returned muted and zombie-like, the vulnerable from pets to people are easy prey. Perhaps the greatest menace is the total absence of empathy. These elements made me wonder how far Dick was drawing from her own life. Dick a lesbian who grew up in a deeply repressive era, and also had a history of suicide attempts and crises, was undoubtedly hyperaware of how rigidly a society’s institutions can police and damage anyone whose behaviour’s labelled undesirable or outside narrow definitions of normality.

But Dick’s story’s not easily unpicked, it’s eerily ambiguous, written in a direct, realist style that highlights the horrors lurking behind every corner - as if George Orwell had been re-edited by Anna Kavan. It’s also oddly graceful at times, filled with moments of quiet beauty, evocative scenes of nature and surrounding countryside. It’s open to multiple interpretations, and curiously suited to now, with its emphasis on environmental destruction, violent culture wars, and fractured societies - it echoes aspects of post-Brexit Britain, even Trump’s America. But whatever meanings may or may not be gleaned from this, I found it impossible to put down, it’s not perfect, but at its best it’s a chilling, thought-provoking, fascinating read.

Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher Faber Editions, imprint of Faber & Faber for an arc