The Vivisectors

by Missouri Williams

A reclusive graduate student is forced into a friendship that destabilizes her life in this surreal, allegorical romance.

In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved—not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all.

Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 26, 2026

About the author

Missouri Williams is a writer and editor who lives in Prague. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Astra, Granta, and Five Dials. Her first book, The Doloriad, was published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Dead Ink Books in the UK.

Reviews

[Readergirl (Izzy) {semi-hiatus} · Rating 2 out of 5]

The voice? -Amazing
The utterly beautiful vocabulary that touched my soul? -Gorgeous
The main charcter? -Infuriating
The plot? -ermm.. plot who?

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱
Hi! And Welcome to my very first ARC review! i wish it was a positive experience, but unfortunately I do not lie.
𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

We follow the story (?) of Agathe, who is SINGULARLY the MOST infuriating, annoying, self centered, unrealistic charcater i have ever met in my life. She gave zero shizz about anyone around her, and not in the good way. Helloo? she drowned her mother WHO WAS IN A VEGETATIVE STATE... I honestly had to read that thrice cuz I wasn't sure i was reading that right. My mouth fell open, i swear I looked like a goldfish for 5 mins over there. She bullied her boss for no reason, gave no explanations for why she ever even acted that way. Her thoughts and acts repulsed me- she had no empathy for other and treated others as if they were the cardboard cuts, paper dolls who have no feelings or emotions or problems.

The Voice
The voice was beautiful. I found myself drifting off, entranced by just how DEEPLY the author felt about the words she was writing, but I could also tell that this was the AUTHOR not the NARRATOR who was saying the words she was saying. The symbolisms of the story were not lost on me and I enjoyed that aspect of it immensely, even though it never really felt like it connect to teh story properly (even though i strongly suspect that i was supposed to).

The Plot
The plot wasn't there. There was buildup and I found myself waiting for SOMETHING to happen. It continually felt like I was waiting for a really good plot that was JUST COMING. But it never came. It built it up and up and my curiosity was piqued but I was let down tremendously.
We didn't even meet the driving force of the plot, the male lead till the 80% mark. And even he wasn't that good to keep me interested. There was basically nothing between the characters adn any sort of relationship felt forced and abrupt. I felt like ti could've been fleshed out more, had the author not suddenly realized that her word limit was near and tried to fit the whole book in the last 20% after wasting the reader's time in the first part.
The lengthy rambling chapters were exhausting sometimes, especially when I wasn't able to draw any connection between the character or WTF WAS GOING ON?

The introspective aspect was lost as soon as the male lead entered and the entire plot shifted its tone, which was extremely odd and uncomfortable for me. For I, as a reader, was led to believe that the entire POINT of the story was going to be otherwise.

The Charcter Development(?)
This charcater was made for charcater development. I could see that. The author knew that. And yet, any sort of "charcater redemption" only happened in the last ten pages, if you could even call it that, because she only told another "meaningful" short story by the way of apologizing for everything she did, which was INADEQUATE to say the very least. OH yea, and this is when she drowned her mother btw so idk how her apologies worked.

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

Final Verdict
Finally I would like to say, I love how this was written. And if the writer actually had a PLOT to write about I would've loved this book very much. but unfortunately she didn't and so I couldn't stand it. The narrator did unforgivable things that she didn't repent for or even realize in full. I had high hopes for this, but here we are.

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𝕻𝖗𝖊 𝕽𝖊𝖆𝖉𖤐✮⋆˙♱

A dark academia that would make me want to slice open a piece of my head to peer into my mind (grotesquely put but ykwim) ?
Yesss plssss

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

PS- I would like to thank NetGalley, the author and the publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book in exchange of my honest review. Thank you!

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

REVIEW TO FOLLOW SOON

[CJ Alberts]

Girl what the hell was this about

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has affected me deeply... makes me want to be different but I'm not sure in what way

[endrju]

The Doloriad was the book of the year for me back in 2023. If you had dog ears, you could’ve heard me squealing with joy when I was approved on NetGalley for The Vivisectors ARC. I quite possibly hit infrasound, to be honest.

The experience of reading The Vivisectors was… complex. There are motifs recognizable from The Doloriad, especially the environment and environmental collapse. The atmosphere, however, is significantly different, as there is no disfigural violence, so to speak. That doesn’t mean Williams has given up on her signature density. Once I abandoned the idea of treating this as a novel in a conventional sense and began approaching it instead as a constellation of elements - motifs, narrative threads, etc. - I started to get somewhere. Where exactly did I end up? I’m not entirely sure. But the fact that I’m still thinking about the book weeks later suggests that something definitely happened.

The mold song:

I was born by a window,
In somebody's room.
It rained and it rained.
The water fed me.
It was never enough -
I was hungry.

The room was a kingdom,
But I was no king.
I was little and lonely,
small and hungry.
A patch of black mold
With small hungry dreams.

One day I noticed
On the beam above me
A patch of dry rot.
It was large and majestic.
It had many eyes.
They all winked at me.

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very consuming read, I really enjoyed the flow of this book and the narrator. This book is some really relatable themes like academic drama, career chaos, family drama, and discrimination. Loved the suspense throughout and the way it shows how communication or lack thereof can affect things. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

I read books about graduate students to overcome my own trauma of being a graduate student hehe!!

[m. · Rating 2 out of 5]

eARC provided by Netgalley in exhange for an honest review.

I'm not really a big believer in the 'show, not tell' advice that is often given to writers. I believe a certain amount of balance is required. Like, I don't need to read three pages describing a room—just like I don't need to be spoonfed every detail about a character's personality through exposition. In The Vivisectors we encounter a strange case: in each section of the novel, Williams is doing one or the other. There is no balance or equilibrium here. Everything is either handed to you, over and over again, in short, sharp sentences, or drawn out over endless paragraphs.

There is a lot of repetition in the writing, and it doesn't seem stylistic. Rather it feels like I'm getting hit in the head with information that could be, instead, passed onto me in a natural way. For example, towards the end of the novel: That evening my uncle had visitors. Then, later in the same page: My uncle's friends were visiting him, and he had opened the doors to the library.

Every time a plot point is set in motion Williams forces it to a halt by info-dumping on a new character, community within this world, past event, or by going on a rant about politics or literature. It makes for an agonizing read. It feels like a constant push and pull—or maybe like a tug of war where Williams is dangling me over the edge of a precipice. Look at this cool thing I wrote! she screams over at me. I try, helplessly, to climb up the rope of her endless, meandering paragraphs, to reach stable ground for even a minute. Only to have her pull me over another hole the next second.

I'm naive and hopeful. I want to attribute this to a lack of editing, and have it not be a choice made by Williams. But then there are moments where the point she's trying to make becomes clear, and I'm left bitter and disappointed. Like when the narrator describes herself as having a rock inside of her: But at the center of my soul there was a big dead rock that wanted nothing to do with anything else (...) She uses that same metaphor consistently throughout the book, so much so that it gets tiring.

Most of all, though, I have to admit I'm confused. I'm not really sure what Williams is trying to do here. She seems to be making fun of herself a lot of the time. A character goes on a multiple page rant about the current lack of quality of modern literature, and he exemplifies this decay by pointing out that most contemporary narrators don't have names—much like Williams' own, which remains unnamed through most of the book. But she also seems to take herself extremely seriously, especially towards the end of the book, within the tight, messy frame she developed.

In a slightly fantastical world of unnamed cities, where nature seems to run wild and grow into huge, lush gardens that no one can keep at bay, Williams seems preoccupied with our own world's problems. She talks about academic decay, immigration and cancel culture within a university structure—problems of which I know nothing about, having escaped from college as quickly as I could. As a result, none of it interests me. I can't say it's entirely her fault, as my deep uninterest in academia has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. She does, however, fail to make me interested in any other aspect of this novel, which is the important part here.

Where in The Doloriad, the characters harshness and bleakness contrasted against their world's own disillusionment, in The Vivisectors the characters blend in and fade against their city's sterile backdrop. None of them are well constructed or developed throughout the book. They all seem like rounded stereotypes, with one or two definiting characteristics that the author exploits over and over again, to no avail. The main character is angry and unfeeling—her boss is needy and stupid—Adam is charming, but empty—her mother tried to kill herself.

The novel, which has a cold, eerie feeling throughout, turns into a mushy love story in the end. I had expected that, and it's precisely because of it that I hoped the author, whose past work I have loved dearly, would prove me wrong. She didn't. In my mind The Vivisectors is a small, metal ball. It's clean and shiny, but impossible to hold on to. It slips between your fingers and it makes a lot of noise when it hits the ground.

[kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

arc received from netgalley in exchange for an honest review

beautiful and dense book which problems lie in it’s narrative and stylistic imbalance. still worth reading imo but read the doloriad first

[thebookybird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly bizarre but I dug it

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wheelbarrow makes a return! Love to see it!

[Krystelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

Sadly this book did not gel with me at all. I have given it two stars on the basis of how pretty some of the writing is, but unfortunately those segments were far and few between. Occasionally I’d hit on a sentence that went right to my heart, but for the most part, I felt like I was reading the absence of a book.

I think that probably encapsulates the feeling of this novel for me best- it really did seem like I was reading a lack of a thing, which was weird. I can’t say any of the characters stood out, or that I remember any particular scenes or specific elements of the book. It just felt so vast and empty, and not in a way that felt intentional- more so in a way that felt sad and dissatisfying.

I am keen to read other works by this author as I understand that they have previously written some really beautiful pieces, but I feel like I definitely missed the boat (and everything else!) with this one.

[Antonin Kilian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Vivisectors come as a surprise after Williams' debut success with The Doloriad. Just as The Doloriad, it is confident and masterfully constructed, entirely in control of its prose, while also being as engaging as any bestseller.

This is the singular achievement of the book: The Vivisectors is an incredible read, a modern campus novel that touches upon numerous contemporary issues and taps into our shared Zeitgeist, but it is also one of the most daring literary fictions of this decade. How extraordinary is the chorus of gardeners? Have you read anything as wild as the mold song? All the while, each chapter and scene fits into this labyrinthine space that, no matter which turn you take, leads to philosophical questions that too many writers just glance at.

The Vivisectors, for its concerns and metafictions, is best compared to Gerard Murnane's The Plains or Nathalie Sarraute's The Golden Fruits, especially in the way that it embeds a discussion about its own techniques along with those of modern literature more generally into its very texture.

Ultimately, Missouri Williams presents not just a book that showcases stark artistic growth, not just a reading experience full of thrill and emotional impact, but also, and most importantly, a mature meditation on our dark times and what literature faces today.

[Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academic Dystopia
A review of the NetGalley ARC eBook released in advance of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux / MCD (US May 26, 2026) and Fourth Estate (UK May 21, 2026) hardcovers / eBooks / audiobooks.

At first glance, The Vivisectors is completely unlike Missouri Williams' debut The Doloriad (2022) which had a breakthrough success by winning the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize and other accolades. Instead of a post-apocalyptic dystopia we have a setting in an unnamed university in an unnamed city and country. The university is decaying in its own dystopic manner though through lack of both physical and perhaps intellectual maintenance.

The lead character, a post-graduate named Agathe comes from a dysfunctional family and now works for a dysfunctional professor at the university. Agathe is basically doing all of the professors' work for her from preparing lectures to marking papers. Meanwhile the prof becomes obsessed with a student named Adam who is in conflict with the university authorities. The university and the city are meanwhile in conflict with the city's maintenance workers who are called the gardeners, so that the infrastructure is going back to nature as plants and vines and ivys envelope the buildings.

This doesn't have the scale of horror that was The Doloriad, even if the decaying infrastructure does signal some sort of coming apocalypse. There is the nod and a wink to Doloriad fans though towards the end when Agathe is forced to take her decrepit mother for a "walk" by using a wheelbarrow.

I'm sure that it could all be read as a metaphor for universities, cities and societies in general in our present day. What most impressed me was that Williams would write something so completely different from her first book. Its meaning is still enough to haunt me regardless.

My thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux / MCD and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this advance ARC copy for which I provide this honest review.

Trivia and Links
Although you might have expected that Williams' short story The Vivisectors (2022) would have been an excerpt from the novel, in fact it does not appear at all. There is a bit of a cross-over theme of an academic setting, but that is all.

As always I was curious about the cover art used for both the US and UK editions. Even with the aid of the reverse image search engine Tin Eye I still couldn't trace a source for the US cover though. The UK cover was easily identifiable though as a cropped image from the painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio where the "doubting Thomas" has to probe the wounds of the resurrected Christ before he will believe.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Like vivisectors, we analyzed a situation until we had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels…More than anything, she said, we loved to sit in judgment. This city! If only it would rain and keep on raining and carry all the streets and the suburbs away, and us along with them. We were vivisectors, she repeated.”

A university and a city in decline, with gardens overgrown.
“Meanwhile the university watched the wildness growing at the heart of the city with fascination. It was a symbol, the academics agreed, of a much greater entropy. Something was underway, a process that could not be stopped. All we could do was let it happen. And besides, they insisted, what was material was secondary, distracting. The sooner we relinquished our hold on it the better. Then we could retreat into the world that mattered, the world of thought, without any distractions. They had a different border to protect.”

Agatha’s disappointed father, her disabled mother, and her estrangement from both.
“All I could imagine existing between us was the strange, restless silence that had characterized our interactions from the very beginning…a conversation had never started, and as the years mounded up behind us the possibility of beginning one had seemed more and more remote, and besides, that imaginary conversation had already become irrelevant because the silent one that raged around its edges was enough to occupy everyone's attention.”

Her mother attempted to end her life, failed, and was left physically and mentally diminished.
“She believed that he no longer loved her sufficiently. He gave her no reassurances to the contrary...After months of vague paranoia my mother had acted in the only way she knew how. With no one left to inflict herself upon, she had inflicted herself upon herself. The results had been dramatic. There was irreversible damage...My mother, my uncle told me, would not be the same as she had been...Good, I replied.”

Agatha lived in an old house with her uncle and worked as an assistant to an academic. Foreign students came from afar to attend the university but the citizens of the city refused to accept the immigrants into their society. Adam, an international student, had a disagreement with a young professor from the university and the news of the argument spread quickly throughout the city. Agatha was tasked with understanding the nature of the conflict.
“I had begun to be in the world and I had found it unbearable….Now that so many doors had been opened, I was determined to close them again—they had been opened against my will. I wanted to live according to my principles, to rediscover the internal compass that until recently had never led me astray. I wanted to create a little order.”

[Ryan Davison · Rating 5 out of 5]

A female narrator (unnamed until the middle of the book), helps a professor manage an academic career on urban planning in an unnamed city being overrun by surrounding gardens and landscapes. We learn the professor is rich, obese, and emotionally scarred, and our young narrator "assists" the deluded woman fabricate an existence by doing all her work. This story is told with washed out emotions; the narrator loathes her own family except for an uncle she lives with and the entrance hall to the family home is decorated with portraits of past relatives turned backwards. Mom has just tried to off herself and is now a vegetable and much more. Also, there’s a vast population of gardeners that work with military precision and wield incredible power keeping certain areas of the city habitable.

The plot develops but remains secondary to the gorgeously stripped-down prose that excises the extraneous. This is an ideas-driven work and even with an abstract plot so rich with of analogy, you can’t put it down.

The Vivisectors is a towering literary achievement, written with a pen and scalpel. The lack of specifics or pleasantries is refreshing because it allows firm focus on incredible writing. It will lingers after you have finished, and you likely won’t be sure why.

Williams is a young author with incredible skill and vision. Highly recommended to fans of literary fiction or those who savor immaculate writing.

Thanks to NetGalley and MCD for a review copy.

[Courtney]

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me this book in exchange for a review- all opinions are my own

I really tried with this book but I ended up dnf’ing it. I loved the premise of the is book, I even read some spoiler free reviews because I had requested it to make sure it was right for me, and on paper it absolutely was perfect for me, it felt like I should have loved this book but I just did not get on with it.

I want to start by saying some of the writing and descriptives are beautiful, I highlife so many quotes in the 35% I did read because they really resonated with me.

But the rest of what I read just did not work. There was no plot in what I had read, it could be that the plot kicks in at a later time but at 35% I would expect to have some understanding or glimmer of the plot. It doesn’t even need to have a plot it may have been of a character study style but it more so just felt like word vomit.

It could have been a mockery of itself, as there is a rant of literature, but it overall just felt confusing as a reader. I have tried to read this on three separate occasions but each one just did not work for me.

I wish this would have as the premise does sound really interesting, I would be tempted to pick this up again and try again but for now I don’t think this is for me, if you are a fan of abstract writing and confusing plot lines then give this a go

[River · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book as I really enjoyed The Doloriad but this just felt lacking in any real substance. I love the author's writing style and the imagery she creates, I just don't really understand what the point of any of it was. Maybe there was something there that was just going completely over my head, or maybe the point of the book is that there is no point, but overall it just left me feeling nothing much of anything.
The greatest love story ever told was a repeated theme throughout the book with multiple people telling different versions of the story, but whether or not this was intended to be a love story in and of itself I couldn't really say. The two characters barely interact and when they do the overall impression is that neither of them particularly like each other right up until the final moments of the book when... they do? I don't know. I just don't know what the intention was behind any of this, but the writing was beautiful nonetheless.
It's just difficult to put into words. I didn't find it boring or unenjoyable, I just don't know what any of it meant.

Thank you to Harper Collins publishing for an early access copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I will say that the prose of this story is very beautiful and flowery to the point of being purple prose, but again very beautiful. The problem was that for a satire about university, this did not feel very satirical, in fact, the story felt so meandering that it really said a whole lot of nothing. There was a lot of repetition and circulatory nature of the plot, which could have been the point but made the story feel never-ending. Also, the descriptions of the main character’s boss felt very fatphobic, especially because she was set up as the antagonist of the story, and her laziness and stuffing her face just felt like ways to show another moral failing to make her the antagonist when her weight isn’t important to the plot. There were also some off putting descriptions about the autistic character, and as an autistic person, the descriptions left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t in good faith recommend this to people due to the fatphobia and weirdness about autistic people.

[jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5**

‘It’s over in seconds. And you understand at once that this is all your fault. You might have thrown him a rope. But it never occurred to you to extend a hand.’

I particularly enjoyed the three renditions of the love stories told in this book, and there were times where particular passages really struck a chord, the writing is beautiful.

But, it’s often quite difficult to follow the story and decipher what the author is getting at. I saw another review that said that at times it feels as if the author is speaking, not Agathe, which I also agree with.

Overall, though confusing, I enjoyed reading this and found it very emotionally affecting towards the end!

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rich, strange, lovely meditation on ivory towers, immigration, and the complicity/remove of academia from urgent social issues. One for people who like the style of Julia Armfield or Ottessa Moshfegh.

[Chelsea]

tedious

[Maya]

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux | MCD for providing me with the ARC.
Pub Date May 26 2026
This book was a very painful read for me, the writing style is very dense and at the same time it feels empty. The sentences are long and stuffed; the descriptions are prolonged and the plot is very little. Up to the 30% I still have no idea what is this book about. Usually I love this type of weird fiction, but here I find everything meaningless. I wanted to give the author another try, because this book still has something intriguing about the reality of the world it creates. The only understanding I could get from the heavy narrative is that there are big overgrown gardens, that are encircling the cities and the gardeners are the people who can tame the flora and keep it at bay. This is some kind of a dystopian fiction, but I couldn’t get into it. I tried to read this author’s other novel as well and I also tried with this one but I am officially giving up at the 30%. It’s just not for me.

[J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And so the villagers buried the little white whale and continued to wait for their little white whale."

Absolute masterpiece.