Persona

by Aoife Josie Clements

A feral shut-in discovers a disturbing internet porn video of what seems to be herself. A seance of coked-up artists summons unearthly forces in a studio apartment. The staircase of an exurban marketing company descends endlessly beneath the earth.

In Aoife Josie Clements’ electric, nightmarish, intricately layered novel, the impossibility of goodness crowds in upon two young trans women barely surviving on sex work and zero-hours contracts. Below the familiar evils of capitalism and the bottomless depths of internet culture, a darker horror awaits. What curse follows these women? What are they escaping? What are they running towards?

Genres: Horror, Queer, Fiction, LGBT, Thriller, Transgender, Contemporary

257 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2026

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a queer horror novel by a trans author with two trans protagonists published by a small press run by trans women - I came to support the cause (#protectthedolls), and stayed for the innovative potential of this actually spooky text. In the first part, we meet Annie, a trans women who hardly leaves her messy apartment and survives on filling out surveys for Chariot, a mysterious company. By disappearing in her own four walls, Annie hopes to escape the dangers of the outside world - but then, she finds an online porn video that seems to feature herself, although she has no recollection of participating in it. Is her sleepwalking to blame? The wine? The pills? Her mental state?

Enter Amy, the main protagonist of part 2. She is a trans woman who works as a cam girl and a helpline operator for, you guessed it, Chariot. While she has friends and a social life, she feels haunted by a ghostly alternate life - and when she encounters a man who is convinced she is someone else, she knows he can lead her to her doppelgaenger. The two women navigate a world of precarious income sources, sexual violence and degradation, discrimination and disposibility, while trying to investigate questions of identity under capitalism and heteronormative patriarchy ("the default persona", which points to everyone being held to a certain standard).

So yes, there are some issues I could now complain about, like the lengthy descriptive passages, the shaky pacing, and the overkill of ideas that aren't all fully developed. But hey: This is a horror novel that is actually surprising and horrifying, talking about trauma in disturbing and thus effective ways. The doppelgaenger motif also plays out unexpectedly, as it is employed to include ideas about self-hatred and fear, showing the oscillation between two parts that form a whole and the aim to remove oneself from psychological aspects that are uncomfortable, aspects that reside within one's own mind.

So this is fresh, challenging horror writing, and I applaud that.

[Becky Spratford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review in the December 2025 issue of Booklist and on the blog: https://raforall.blogspot.com/2025/12...

Three Words That Describe This Book: disorienting, doppelgänger, nightmarish

More words-- thought provoking, hard truths, immersive terror, SF horror

Impressive Debut-- I am excited to see what else this author can do. The storylines of first Annie and then Amy-- telling the same story in part 1 and 2 but from Annie and then Amy's perspective was an awesome narrative choice. And then part 3, they come together-- it is so disorienting both because their names are similar and they look the same and they are in conversation back and forth..... what a great example of the writing itself adding to the readers disorientation. It ratchets up the unease and makes the entire story better.

And then they go on a road trip together to visit the company they have found out they both work for and.....it goes from disorienting to nightmarish and quite honestly existentially terrifying. This is when the book goes from a good horror story about 2 trans women who find out they look exactly the same and have mirror image apartments to a universally terrifying story.

It stays realistic even as it gets more nightmarish and delves into a bit of SF horror. So many stairs. I don't want to go into a stairwell anytime soon. Seriously.

The entire metaphor the doppelgänger as what it feels like to live as a transperson is not new-- the life before and after- but what Clements does with it is unique and new. Also, being trans in and of itself has nothing to do with the horror. It is just who these two women are. The horror is much much much bigger than them and their lives. I loved that as well.

The book is a horror story that critics late stage capitalism, especially how hard it hits young workers, the horror of lives rules by the internet, and how easy and horrific it is for women on the fringes of society to turn to sex work for money. Loneliness, depression, suicide are all here. Garbage piling up and lots of bugs as well. But the garbage and bugs are there to set the stage. They are not the horror.

This book is a solid 4.5. Like a lot of excellent debuts, it needed a bit more at the end. I loved that the ending was not tidy and that all the problems were not solved. But it needed just a bit stronger of a statement about the SF esque horror parts. Something to bring the terror out of the book. The last pages try to do that but I think it could have been more effective and stronger (I am trying very hard to not give anything away). If that final page was a little more direct and less detached (to mirror the directness and immersive present of the rest of the book) it would have been 5 stars for sure.

Overall-- a strong debut that will linger with readers long after turning the final page, every time they log into an internet chat room or even (as I said before) started walking down a long stairwell. *shivers*

Readalikes: There are many ways this book could lead readers to another title. Blake Crouch is an excellent readalike here. The Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling, Coup de Grace by Sofia Ajram, and Tell Me I'm Worthless by Allison Rumfitt

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chilling, enthralling novel about two trans women with an uncanny connection. Their shared destiny brings them to the depths of their own hells, and another void beckons, too. Will their rage protect them or lead them blindly into dangers unknown? Clements’ prose is subtle as she crafts an intelligent, ungovernable spiral-down-the-drain story that stuns until its bitter end.

[Remi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Persona has a fascinating and unsettling core idea about identity, specifically, what makes a person themselves in an era where our bodies and images exist online in ways we can’t fully control. the novel begins with amy discovering what seems to be pornographic footage of herself, with no memory of ever filming it. later, we meet annie, who tells the same story of performing in porn online and who happens to look exactly like amy. when they finally meet, the question becomes less who is copying who and more: if we can be replicated, what makes us real?

this is where the book is strongest. the philosophical horror is real, and it spirals into that uncomfortable, almost dissociative territory where the self starts to feel unstable. the horror isn’t just in the events, but also in what it makes you think about afterwards. the existential crisis is the monster.

however, here’s where the book lost me. the writing often leans into a grimy, shabby atmosphere, and while i understand this is part of the horror, i personally found it overwhelming. the air feels heavy. it’s immersive, but in a way that made me want to step back from the page instead of lean in. for me, it sometimes crossed into murkiness, where i felt myself getting lost rather than drawn deeper.

the idea resonated. the experience did not. while i absolutely appreciate what the author is doing: the questions of selfhood, identity, capitalism, and how we are consumed, i didn’t find the actual reading journey satisfying. the horror works, but not in a way that felt enjoyable. it’s a book that will stick in my thoughts, but not one i loved living inside.

-------

to-read:

certainly a reasonable and realistic fear in our modern world, i'm scared

*thank you to LittlePuss Press for the ARC*

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much to like about this book, particularly the final third, which I described as “TGirl Ginger Snaps but with doppelgängers.” That said, a star came off for the first 2/3, which held compelling ideas that got muddled somewhere along the line. The book shaped up nicely, but I think could have used more editing for clarity and purpose in the beginning.

[Zach Laengert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um, incredible!?

So many shades of horror wrapping over this story of two trans women just trying to survive in their own ways.

Well, I'm gonna have to write about this on Tuesday.

[Brad Walker]

One of the perks of running an indie bookstore is sometimes publishers will just stop in to say hey and drop off some swag. Big thank you to LittlePuss Press for providing me with this ARC.

Honestly this sounds like the most up-my-street kind of book I've encountered in a long time. From the Consortium website:



A trans woman discovers pornography of herself she has no memory of making, only to find herself led to an unimaginably deeper evil.

"The best book I've read in years." —Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt

"An old pain made unreal and vivid in the sputtering, intermittent, blue-lit blight of now." —Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold

A feral shut-in discovers a disturbing internet porn video of what seems to be herself. A seance of coked-up artists summons unearthly forces in a studio apartment. The staircase of an exurban marketing company descends endlessly beneath the earth.

In Aoife Josie Clements’ electric, nightmarish, intricately layered novel, the impossibility of goodness crowds in upon two young trans women barely surviving on sex work and zero-hours contracts. Below the familiar evils of capitalism and the bottomless depths of internet culture, a darker horror awaits. What curse follows these women? What are they escaping? What are they running towards?

[ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm. I liked Amy’s sections better than Annie’s. Ending was interesting.

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 4 out of 5]

BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 8/10

TL;DR: A filthy, funny, soul-sick spiral about a trans woman getting eaten alive by the gig economy, the internet’s Default Persona, and a company that wants your body on file, literally. It’s ambitious as hell, gross in the best ways, and weirdly tender when it counts. Read it if you like your horror smart, mean, and emotionally radioactive.

Aoife Josie Clements is a Calgary, Alberta born writer and multidisciplinary artist whose work sits at the intersection of trans survival, underground performance, and nasty little systems-horror. Alongside fiction, she makes music as Ravine Angel, a persona she’s described as emerging from open mics and noise gigs in Calgary in 2018, using that project to explore identity in increasingly explicit ways over the years, and she’s since been based in Vancouver, BC on the music side. She’s also active in trans-adjacent underground film and media circles with a role as an executive producer of the Castration Movie Anthology, and she has performed in that project as well, working alongside director Louise Weard. That collaboration extends into other public-facing work, including appearances described as co-producer/co-star in writing about Castration Movie. She additionally co-hosts a film-focused podcast (TRANS PANIC) with Weard, which fits the broader pattern here: Clements’ fiction feels like it’s coming from someone steeped in live-performance intensity, DIY media, and the exact kind of cultural sludge Persona is pissed off about.

Clements shows up swinging. Persona is a debut that reads like someone who’s been quietly sharpening knives for years and finally decided to start throwing them. It moves like an album that keeps changing genres mid-track without losing the hook. There’s the essayish cultural critique, the confessional grief-bile, the nightmare logic, the body-horror money shots. Somehow it all coheres into one big, buzzing indictment: of extraction, of shame, of the way “just survive” becomes a lifestyle until you forget you’re allowed to want more.

Here’s the anchor without spoiling the machinery. Annie is a young trans woman living in a shrinking little world, trying to make rent and stay invisible enough to not get hurt. She works for Chariot, a remote survey mill that pays pennies and asks increasingly fucked questions about war crimes and consumer preference like it’s all the same drop-down menu. Then the portal throws an error that feels like a curse: “NETWORK INSECURE. PLEASE SIGN IN FOR BODY SCAN.” Annie did this job specifically so strangers would not get access to her body, and now the job is basically saying: lol, actually, we need to look at you. What follows is a fracture. Annie’s sense of self, safety, and even basic reality starts slipping sideways, and she’s forced into contact with another version of her life and another version of herself, Amy, who is both a mirror and a warning. Together they try to figure out what Chariot actually is before it finishes whatever the hell it started.

The book weaponizes the everyday into cosmic dread. The “Default Persona” passages are nasty little sermons about online anonymity and how it becomes a mask you can’t take off, even when it’s poisoning you. And then Clements takes that social truth and makes it physical. The horror isn’t just “people are shitty online.” It’s “identity is a resource,” and somewhere a system is built to harvest it. That’s why the body scan scene hits like a panic attack. The interface is banal, the language is customer-service polite, and it keeps repeating a phrase that turns into a chant: “Reposition please.” Annie’s eyes get “thoroughly fucked,” the room fills with distortion, and the past comes up like bile. It’s sensory overload rendered with cruel precision.

Then, later, the book goes full Hell Factory. We get a vision of Chariot’s literal infrastructure: a tower surrounded by a trench of bodies, waste, heat, and recycling, with metallic arms selecting which bodies get to “go out” and which get dismantled for parts. It is revolting, hypnotic, and grimly funny in that “oh cool, capitalism is an eldritch organism” way. When the narrative starts talking about same-face boys used for labor and minerals, it’s not subtle, and thank Christ for that. Subtlety is overrated when the world is already screaming.

Persona is written like a fever diary that also has a theory degree. The prose can spool out in long, incantatory runs, then snap into clean, clinical UI language, then pivot into second-person “you” like it’s aiming a camera straight at your guilt. Clements uses repetition the way horror directors use a recurring sound cue: phrases come back slightly re-contextualized until they stop being words and start being pressure. Even the book’s design nods at unease, with a note about the fonts being “awkward” and “too loose,” hoping it left you “slightly uneasy.” Mission accomplished, you sickos.

The themes linger like cheap smoke in a hoodie. Identity here is both survival tool and commodity, constantly threatened by systems that demand you flatten yourself into something legible. Annie’s dissociation, her history of sleepwalking, her sense that she might not “exist” the way she thought she did, all of it gets expressed through horror machinery that is literally about bodies being processed, faces being standardized, and life being outsourced. The aftertaste is that lilac-green underpass light, the feeling of being watched by a screen that calls itself customer support.

Amongst transgressive queer horror, Persona feels like a big, nasty step forward: not just transgressive for shock, but transgressive because it refuses the polite lie that any of this is fine. By the time you’re watching someone sing under an overpass with a scavenged karaoke machine, half-begging, half-performing a self back into existence, you realize the book has dragged you somewhere real, and it did it with a grin and a mouth full of broken glass.

Excellent, weird, ambitious, and memorable, like getting your soul audited by a haunted HR portal and still crawling out saying, holy shit, I’m alive.

Read if you can handle body horror that is wet, industrial, and not interested in your lunch plans or you like books that mix cultural critique with nightmare logic.

Skip if you hate internet-voice essay segments and second-person accusation energy or you do not want gross-out imagery tied to sex, shame, and systems.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This starts with a shut-in named Annie, who spends her days answering surveys that pay very little. One day she finds an online porn video and the woman in the video looks exactly like her. She becomes obsessed with finding her doppelgänger. She goes outside at some point, bites a train conductor, and runs through the streets back to her filthy apartment. The second part in the novel follows Amy, who makes money doing online sex work and has a social life but is still mostly disconnected from her friends. She is especially awful to her friend Vivian. Amy watches the video of Annie biting the train conductor on a horror channel she likes to watch. Both parts 1 and 2 are told in first person, while part 3 is told in third person. In the third part Amy and Annie finally meet, make plans to live together, and go on a road trip. They stop to explore a company they both worked for.

I felt so uneasy while I read this book. There's a sense of dread throughout the entire novel. The way Amy and Annie's names sound so similar had me wondering if maybe one or both of them were fake, especially when they both question their lived experiences. There is also a lot of commentary about community, capitalism, the internet, misogyny, and transphobia. Readers who are fans of Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen-Felker Martin may like this book.

[Caitlin Holloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that I could speak about endlessly, the blurring of reality that at the same time reinforces the existential nightmare of the everyday. A broken mind in a broken world written into a narrative that oozes with a level of raw commentary and experimental writing styles that I feel like only a gender non-conforming author would be able to write with honesty and flair. Someone who has pushed past a kind of reality that wasn't true to them to speak at the raw essence of society and identity in a way that is entirely both profound and original.

[Vanesa Pacheco · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

WTF.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I generally really liked this book. The writing, concept, and vibe are right up my alley. The main thing holding it back is that the last section, which is only short, felt very pointless. I didn't get anything extra out of that last section. But I really liked the rest of the book.

There were a few grammar/copying errors in my copy of the book. But it's from a small publishing house and it's a unique printing so 🤷

[Bakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

When someone literally says “go fuck yourself”…

“He explained to me that while he’d never thought he’d meet someone like me, the work of keeping me together had become too much”. Ouch.

[Ember · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s basically an f’d up version of parent trap

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

3⭐️

Persona is a concept-driven exploration of identity, dissociation, and the performance of self in digital and physical spaces. The story itself is refreshing and takes a deep dive into personhood, gender, visibility, and fragmentation. At its best, the book is intellectually engaging and unsettling in deliberate ways.

Where the novel succeeds is in its ideas. I had really high hopes for this and about halfway through the story was meeting those expectations. But towards about 75% in, I felt disappointed.

Where it fell short for me was in execution. The narrative often felt emotionally distant, and the abstraction frequently overpowered the story itself. While I understood what the book was aiming to do, I felt like there was so much build up with not enough payoff at all.

Readers who prefer theory-forward, experimental fiction and are comfortable with discomfort and ambiguity will enjoy this, however, readers looking for emotional intimacy or narrative momentum may struggle.

Overall, Persona was okay- not the best and not the worst.

Disclosure: Thank you to Edelweiss, Little Puss Press, and the author for providing an advance copy of this book ahead of its release. This review is voluntary and reflects my honest opinion.

[Em · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is split into 4 parts - part one as Annie’s POV, part two as Amy’s, part 3 together, and part 4… I struggled to get through part 1 as the imagery overwhelmed the plot for me. Part 2 brought some more plot, and I was interested in where their story would take me, but the wrap up was too fast, too confusing, and left too many unanswered questions. I wanted more about Chariot. And I wish the overarching commentary on society wasn’t so vague that I couldn’t follow.

[George H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a solid 4.5 but giving it a 5 because of how it made me want to go up to random people on the street, shake them and beg them to read this book.

As a horror buff, every so often I come across a book that catches me completely off guard, with themes that demand meditation, and horror that feels genuinely arresting. This is one of those books.

Deeply literary at its core, I've spent the past few days in a fugue thinking about character decisions, powerful lines, and overall what the horror aspects are telling.

Told in (mostly) three parts, the story first follows an agoraphobic 20 year old trans woman, Annie, who answers anonymous quizzes for money and spends a large part of her time on shady chat rooms. Her boyfriend just broke up with her and she deals with the fallout in complete isolation. Retreating deeper into herself Then, one evening, she discovered a porn video of what seems to be herself that completely shatters her worldview.

The second section follows a much more gregarious trans woman, Amy, who works both as an HR liaison and cams on the side. She becomes obsessed with the idea that she doesn't feel completely "whole" and soon discovers a video of someone who looks just like her in a "feral" context, making a scene at a train station. Her quest for wholeness becomes an obsession to meet this woman, while old nightmares come back to haunt her.

These first two sections were exacting, treated with excellent world building, dialogue, characterization, and plot. Then the engine loses a little steam by the third section, while still having excellent moments that ground this debut and cement its position as a 4.5 for me.

In the third section, they finally meet, and the sci-fi aspects hinted in section one take a new life, albeit in a lopsided way that begged further exploration, but overall felt satisfying enough for me.

People have mentioned how "disorienting" the book feels, which I feel largely comes from the first batch of chapters that make the reader worry about a chapter ending and not knowing where the beginning of the next chapter will start, which was an amazing technique that helped me understand Annie's worries, as if each chapter began with the anxiety she gets from sleepwalking. As more of the story is uncovered, a larger unease infects the page: the first two sections feel like they're told a little "wrong". Readers are looking for certain details as they learn more about the story, but may be confused or surprised by how they show up. I am a big fan.

Then there's the literary impulses that made this book feel like a true treasure: as most have mentioned, themes of "doppelganger" / double life were most obvious, but there are a ton more, such as the relationship that being trans has to being perceived, power and loss, dangers of men, self-destruction, trans people being really "seen" rather commodified and how modern capitalism churns out destruction of the self, community, and the world.

All of it felt so fruitful to explore, and close readings of pivotal scenes felt rewarded (e.g. Silas and Clara's philosophy rant, Vivian's last conversation with Amy, and Amy and Annie's first contact).

I especially loved the exorcism scene. No notes.

It's incredibly readable, it's a bit messy, it's fun, and it will have you staring at the wall on deep contemplation after you're done. Please read Persona.

[Yared · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is easy to devour but burns the whole way down, all the way through the twists and turns of gut. i entirely forgot i preordered it, so when it arrived in the mail, it showed up as an incongruous and offputting spectre from the unknown (fittingly so). it sticks in your brain like shrapnel.

[Peyton Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 1/2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I imagine I will not read something as weird and terrifying as this book this year…abandon hope all ye who enter…

!EDIT!
i’m changing this to 5 stars because it’s been a few days and I can’t stop thinking about this

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mmmmm fully realised goopy filth. I enjoyed this a lot.

[Arrianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally picked this back up again, and WTF was this?

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, the setup here is one of those bone deep nightmares - what if one day you were minding your business and trying to survive, and you found porn of yourself online. The post capitalist hellscape here ends up becoming literal in an absolutely eerie escalation as the book goes on, and as Amy and Annie circle and eventually intersect with each other and try to figure out how this happens, there's something else waiting for them both. I actually really like that this doesn't try to say that everything's going to be ok in the end, that sometimes all that's waiting for you is a void you can choose to walk into or not, and the choosing not to might end up breaking you as well. Hell of a debut, and if she choosess to, I can't wait to see what else Ms. Clements has up her sleeve for us.

[Raaven💖 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to edelweiss as well as the publisher for reaching out and giving me this ARC in exchange for my honest review!!

This was a trip. It has a little bit of everything. While I wasn’t too sure about a lot of points I liked what I could understand. 2 girls with the same face live different lives. Annie and Amy were interesting in how different they were. Annie was a recluse who lived in a barely livable apartment and only interacted with her boyfriend and people on the internet. Amy had a lot of friends but could never really connect with anyone fully. They had different childhoods and upbringings. They are both trans women. The way this got twisted into a sci-fi cosmic horror I didn’t get as much, but I liked the journey.

[Psycheros · Rating 2 out of 5]

im sorry i really wanted to like this especially seeing the end where it said that this was by an indie feminist press run by trans women.
1. A (or maybe more? i didn't really pay attention that much after a point) grammatical error, close to the start, too.
2. I really appreciated all the topics it brought forward but in the end, it was just that. They were brought up and left there, not at all elaborated or explored.
3. The ending also was just...? Idk this whole book, especially the ending felt weird. I mean i could take weird (to a certain point i guess) but it has to have the writing skills to elevate and emulate it, this just was not it.

[Ailey | Bisexual Bookshelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I really want to try to keep my job at arm's length from my life. It feels like there's so much pressure to let everything blend into one and let it consume me, to make my life and my sexuality and my personality and my online presence all one and the same, and I feel dissociated enough from my body already without adding all those extra layers of meaning onto it.”

Thank you to Littlepuss Press for the gifted copy! This book was published in the US on January 27, 2026.

There’s a moment early in Persona where the narrator clicks through survey questions about trauma for money, rating her own suffering on a scale while trying to stay efficient, detached, and productive. That tension sits at the center of this novel. It asks what it means to live inside a body, an identity, a system that is constantly being measured, consumed, and repackaged.

We follow a shut-in narrator who hasn’t left her apartment in a year, surviving on online surveys, sedatives, and chatrooms where she can disappear into a “default persona.” When she finds a porn video of herself she doesn’t remember making, the story fractures, opening into another perspective: Amy, a cam girl navigating autonomy, surveillance, and survival under the same corporate structure. Their lives begin to mirror each other in unsettling ways, until the line between them starts to collapse entirely.

Clements writes with a kind of controlled unraveling. The prose moves between clinical observation and something more embodied and unsettling, capturing the rhythm of intrusive thoughts and dissociation without flattening them. There’s a sharp awareness of systems at play here, but the novel never loses sight of the interior cost of living inside them.

What stayed with me most is how Persona holds identity as something both deeply felt and constantly mediated. Gender, labor, and desire are all shaped by the same forces that reward visibility while punishing it. The split between Annie and Amy reads as both literal and emotional, a way of tracing how we fragment ourselves to survive. There’s also a quiet thread of longing running beneath the horror, a desire to be recognized without distortion.

The ending leans into ambiguity in a way that may not work for everyone. The shift into Chariot and the cloning reveals feels intentionally opaque, and I found myself wanting more grounding after such a precise buildup. Still, that lack of clarity didn’t undo the experience for me. If anything, it pushed me back into the novel’s questions about selfhood, complicity, and what it means to keep living inside systems that harm us.

This is a difficult, unsettling read, but it’s also a deeply thoughtful one.

📖 Read this if you love: introspective horror that lingers in the body; fragmented, psychologically rich narratives about identity and self-perception; stories that sit at the intersection of queerness, labor, and digital life; and bleak, systems-aware fiction that refuses easy answers.

🔑 Key Themes: Gender and Selfhood, Dissociation and Fragmentation, Surveillance and Digital Labor, Capitalism and Exploitation, Shame and Visibility, Violence and the Body, Longing for Recognition and Care.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Suicidal Thoughts (moderate), Alcohol (moderate), Self Harm (minor), Blood (moderate), Gore (minor), Sexual Content (severe), Torture (minor), Agoraphobia (severe), Panic Attacks (minor), Hoarding (moderate), Mental Illness (severe), Transphobia (moderate), Drug Use (moderate), Suicide Attempt (severe), Death of Parent (minor), Injury (minor).

[J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A journey into late capitalist isolation, where the machinery of the system impresses on the body itself.

This was a a rec from a fellow trans person on The Apps. I don't have a background in horror but decided to try fiction rather than the startling film and TV material. This is the vile puke of a trans gut who has metabolized Kafka and found the exact right contemporary context to lay its various appendages down. Clements has done a very good exploration of transness, of a trans lens to contemporary fears and pain, while also being routine and unsentimental about what the trans characters have accepted. The sense of being both hurt by people but guilty that a trans body takes up any physical or mental space to other people.

I'm also going to point out a couple formatting choices I felt went very good- the mixture of fonts in situations of three or even form different streams of text running to each other. The sense of a space that's both very dense

Annie, a POV character, ditching dialogue at all in their parts, the mind being the sole perspective, character, everything filtered through a sense of anxiety and exposure.

Finally, as Clements notes in the end, the Mrs Eaves font that most of the book is in. There's a slightly uncanny nature to bits of it- the very narrow stroke to start a lower-case p, a lower-case f merging with the top of a question mark. Sometimes it's designed to run together, as with the first two letters of a work, but otherwise it runs into each other. Along with the narrow format of the paperback itself, gives a light sense like you're reading a 257 page kidnapping random threat.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The concept of this book really had me hooked but its execution couldn't necessarily live up to its promise. I was really enjoying Personas first two parts which acted as personal vignettes of the lives of two transgirls who look identical. I particularly enjoyed Amy's chapters because its when the plot started to feel like it was building up to something. However, by part 3 everything the book felt like it was building momentum to was dropped in favor of having the two girls lesbian uhaul it to the backrooms to wrap the book up.

Spoilers

The ending just felt very rushed and inconsistent with the rest of the book especially the short lesbian romance which felt drastically out of place. Gay cleaning montages between my psychosexual descent to the cloning factory. Once the "twist" was revealed to be a generic man behind the curtain wrapped up with an ornamental bow of capitalist critique I was fully checked out. This book could have done well with some heavy editing. Outside of grammatical errors the plot had some stark inconsistencies and too many dropped plot threads to even start to list. It reminded me of my own failed book projects as a teen.

I did enjoy this personal look into another gay persons head, but I always enjoy that. I did however follow the author on letterboxd and she never followed me back, so take this as revenge girl.

[Red Newsom · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a captivating, terrifying experience that was.

A novel with so many layers, we're first introduced to Annie - surrounded by bags of garbage, having not left her apartment in a year. She's filling out online surveys for a tiny amount of cash when she discovers a pornographic video where the woman looks exactly like her.

Part two we flip to Amy; the girl in the video. She's the mirror image of Annie and the novel weaves their stories together so well. How is this possible? Are they the same person? And if not.. wtf?

There's a sharp genre shift from horror to sci-fi in part three that I've no interest in spoiling for you, but I can only say that I wish I hadn't decided to eat a mince pie whilst reading the tail end of the book.

For a novel with such astute commentary on identity, individual choice, capitalism etc I did feel like the ending could have been stronger. I wasn't expecting all the answers but I had to reread the last couple of pages a few of times wondering what I was missing. All in all it's a propulsive, sickening, brilliant journey. I am so excited to hear everyone's opinions when Persona is published in January!

Overall: excellent. Feels like a cross between Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt and Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram.

[Naima · Rating 3 out of 5]

i actually really liked the first two parts of it, but i think both the final reveals of why they’re identical and the sudden pivot to a corporate backrooms style horror zoomed out too far from the rest of the story. the first two parts are character studies at a claustrophobic proximity and do a good job showing that annie and amy are mirror images that reflect the worst traits they try to hide, but once part three hit and they meet, it felt like the author was in a rush to get to setting up the capitalist critique with the underground fountain that creates copies of one guy with different false memories. i also think the fact that annie technically did not see amy when she found that porn of ‘herself’, because amy makes a point not to show her face in her videos, which is furthered by the manager later saying the clones are predisposed to sex work really ran under the radar, when i think that’s a really fascinating thing to explore. i think either there should’ve been a part between part one and two that started to set up the corporate capitalist horror more, or the book should’ve turned to talking about the other clones’ lives