The Vivisectors

by Missouri Williams

‘An astonishing novel by an astonishing writer. Playful, digressive, and pulsating with existential energy’ MICHAEL MAGEE

‘Fun, biting and wise’ ZOE DUBNO

‘As brilliant as it is dark … unlike anything I’ve read before’ VULTURE

The acclaimed author of The Doloriad returns with a wildly imaginative and daring new novel following a reclusive graduate as her attempts to navigate campus conspiracies set her on a collision course that will upend her once quiet life.

In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation, where power is held in a fragile balance between the academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, Agathe spends her days listlessly propping up the career of her fraudulent professor boss. One day, a campus scandal threatens to rupture her carefully managed Adam, a contrarian and the pet student of her boss, comes into heated conflict with a rising young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. As the crisis consumes the university, Agathe remains unmoved. But when her boss instructs her to turn double agent and gather information by befriending Adam, Agathe finds herself both caught up in the events tearing the city apart and increasingly drawn towards the alluring student at the heart of it all. But can anyone be taken at their word in a struggle over the truth?

Coursing with icy suspense and rendered with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for a broken era. Missouri Williams holds up a mirror to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of blazing spiritual reckoning.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Horror, Dark Academia, Novels, Academia, Contemporary

289 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 21, 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

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
This is a wonderfully outrageous novel about the destructive force of living in a tower of words, about a world in which narratives expand and reality dies because of it. Telling stories can be a catalyst for the apocalypse - now that's a statement tale to nominate for a prize that promotes the power of fiction. These judges are badasses, and I'm here for it. Our narrator is Agathe, she lives in a prominent town with a prestigious university that turns into a swamp, being destroyed by mold and overgrowth (not only evoking the Biblical flood, but also an inversion of climate change that brings deadly heat waves: here, it rains all the time). Her society is structured around the opposition of two classes: The academics that aim to contain the world by turning all phenomena into words and narratives which move further and further from what they once described, thus creating a type of Baudrillardian hyperreality that swallows the material world, and the gardeners, a working class that tries to fight the overgrowth and keep the city from crumbling.

Agathe comes from a well-known family of academics and lives with her famous uncle, she had a rift with her parents and now visits them again after her mother tried to take her own life by drowning (water again!), which left her severely disabled. The family is unhappy that Agathe did not stay at the university (where she studied literature, so how tales are constructed) and instead works for a woman who came from abroad and teaches urban planning et al. at the university - Agathe does basically all the academic work required, and her boss gets entangled in a scandal sorrounding another student, hailing from the same foreign place as her (clue to class, gender, identity politics, different marginalized groups etc.). There are many hints that the town with its university is a former colonial power, a Western power in decline, a place that lives off its myth more than its reality, and the myth is being deconstructed by those who manage to enter the place from the periphery.

The novel lives from its abundance of smart sentences, remarks and scenes with strong allegorical value and the intricate (although also challenging) construction around the different types of tales we tell ourselves and others, often interrupting the main story arc. The narrator, possessed by anger, aims to numb herself in order to survive, but the reader knows that this is a futile endeavor: Who she is depends on narrative, and while her passion is editing, she is the narrator of the book and thus holds power - words are never neutral. I love how the novel plays with readers aiming to decipher what the text wants to express, again and again offering us the interpretation of events right with the events, thus repeatedly telling us to touch grass and challenging us to think about the intellectualization of the world: While we read "The Vivisectors", the world happens around us. (Don't get me wrong: I have zero regrets reading this, it's awesome, the real world be damned - yes, I'm part of the problem :-).)

This is such a fun, whacky novel, a delight for readers like me who enjoy hunting for clues and testing out interpretations, full of unexpected twists and turns. I want this daring endeavor to get shortlisted.

[CJ Alberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

Girl what the hell was this about

[Elena · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been in a depressive episode since May, and it's just past my birthday, and life is so unfair and I'm so tired of everything and everyone. Thinking about doing my job makes me want to barf but thinking about doing activities I enjoy also make me want to barf. I think about a month ago I was still experiencing really hardcore mood swings, bitter hatred and anger towards everyone and everything, but now I've mostly just got anhedonia and I can't even hate myself for my inability to go on morning walks, my refusal to pick the ripening raspberries, my failure to keep in touch with friends and loved ones, my resentment of the effort required to go upstairs and take a piss. Like, I thought to myself the other day that petting my cat seemed like too much effort. "Hey isn't this a book review?" you might be asking, and the answer is yes, but I want to set the stage: I am exactly the sort of pathetic, spiritually inbred lump who should enjoy a book about a nasty resentful little bigot who feels very little and thinks only in a dull litany of exposition, or at least find reading such a book tolerable, since I don't care about anything and feel distant contempt for everyone just like the narrator. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy it. I owe Missouri Williams this much. Thank you for writing a book that was annoying enough that I felt moved to articulate how little I respect millennial novelists.

The narrator of The Vivisectors lives in a college town (excuse me: university city? They're British, probably, it doesn't really matter) that is being slowly overtaken by vegetative growth. She comes from a family of writers and academics; her mother is disabled and tried to kill herself right before the opening of the novel, her father is annoying and cruel, and she lives with her uncle in a sort of watered-down psychosexual Gothic parody house, across the city from her parents (who live in a different type of watered-down psychosexual Gothic parody house; more on that later). The walls are full of mice and the tables are full of animal droppings, the carpet's full of mold and the garden is ever-encroaching, but her uncle's visitors don't seem to mind all that, or the author forgot she'd written all the Gothic details in when describing the visitors. We never really find out, because while The Vivisectors portrays supernatural phenomena, it is uninterested in exploring anything about the uncanny in meaningful depth. Just as wealthy homes often use restrained white lights and candles in windows to differentiate themselves from tacky inflatable-Rudolph-and-blinking-lights houses, so too does The Vivisectors give the impression of self-conscious Halloweenism. Sure, there's magic, but my God, how gauche to expect elaboration of any aspect of the magic beyond how it looks draped over brick walls or how it feels as a restrained religious allegory. These fake spiderwebs are made of silk, not plastic, and they will be removed by noon on November 1st.

As the novel progresses, Agathe's dissociative spite slowly transforms into desperate not-quite-humanity. She works for a boss she hates, goes on long walks she describes with a kind of hollow melodrama (socks full of blood. Really?), befriends and then falls in love with the subject of a campus cancel culture tempest, and observes the slow municipal breakdown of her city as its gardeners go on strike. There are allegorical stories and extensive, sophomoric meditations on the nature of power. Very few proper nouns are used; we are treated to endless repetitions of "the city" and "the university" and "her language" and "what he said". This is the sort of artistic choice that becomes affectation very early on. The book, at least, is short.

Agathe does live in a world roughly like ours in many ways. She sends and receives emails, certain ethnic groups are the subject of conspiracy theories or were subjugated by hundreds of years of slavery, she obsesses over her step count on her phone, cities have apartment blocks and suburbs. I say this because I want to underscore how frustrating I find the coy refusal to engage with the internet as an influential force in any substantive way. So many modern authors, younger ones especially, perform cowardly sleights of hand when portraying a world inflected by the internet. We know the characters are online, but something—terror of seeming dated, paranoia about specificity of platform or subculture, sheer laziness—prevents these authors from using their craft to portray their characters' relationships with technology in a naturalistic manner. Instead we get abstractions, elisions, and too-cute allegories. In Agathe's case this abstention makes reading her first-person narration perplexing in the same way as reading a book review that angrily lists out plot holes that don't exist, or listening to someone discuss the events of a movie they clearly watched while fucking around on social media. She feels incomplete.

This feeling of incompleteness persists despite internet culture and its influence on the novel being discussed in explicit, near-didactic terms. Agathe's boss's child is a statue Twitter fascist, and Agathe listlessly half-agrees with him. The international students, Adam, the boss, many characters interact with Internet culture and speak about its foibles. Agathe herself is relentlessly cynical about power relations, and her interior life (derogatory) will be familiar to anyone who's watched the blue state fascists of Twitter and Substack convince themselves they're not Nazis, or convince themselves that they are, since Nazis have to be willing to kill people in non-aesthetically-pleasing ways. This would probably be tiresome if the novel bothered to stake out any meaningful ideological positions, but you can feel, midway through, the author choosing instead to lean in to religious allegory. Adam, after all, was the first man, and St. Agatha the patron saint of rape victims. Agathe is tormented by dreams of falling down staircases, her father removed all the staircases in their house, and she kills her mother in the last few pages of the novel. This is a trauma plot is a sainthood narrative is a self-aggrandizing parable of the internet. But what it's not is a novel willing to taint itself with details. The fascism stays abstract. The city, choked by nature, is described almost exclusively in trite visual terms. The novel even contains its own meta-critique: it "lacks local colour", but that's not unique to the novel as "almost every world feels abandoned". The thesis is that the internet has changed the world (true) and thus that we're in a sort of mediocre cultural fallow period before spring growth pops out of the ground. The problem is that this is a topic for an essay, not a novel which glances at big ideas like a thirteen year old confronted with the varsity showers.

I suspect that Williams views this as a good thing, or at least that she'd respond to such criticism with praise for the modern novel in all its nonspecific glory. Isn't negative space interesting? Isn't the juxtaposition between the wild, overgrown, magical garden and the crass, urban planning teaching, email avoidant boss so delightful? But the truth is that this conceit, if in fact it is a conceit rather than memetic laziness from a fan of Sheila Heti, is just as annoying to read as the clunkily written yet sweatily ambitious multi-generational sagas of the mid-2000s. Modern writers are always dwelling on literary innovation and scoffing at the concept of trying to tell a good story: isn't plot overrated? Isn't worldbuilding the job of sci-fi/fantasy, which of course we all enjoy but would not deign to write? At some point you have to wonder if perhaps characters that are over-written to the point of parody, or under-written to the point of vapor, serve mainly to compensate for, or distract from, underdeveloped storytelling skills. Innovation in form and subversion of traditional story structure in many newer novels isn't much more than a band-aid. You can always claim that your novel's flaws (rickety plotting, pointlessly contradictory narration, carelessly awful sentences, no setting to speak of) are part of the point, and therefore it is lowbrow to complain about them.

One issue with this lack of specificity is that it makes the book's central plot ludicrously stupid. Adam is being CANCELLED!!! for something he said. We never find out what it is. We never find out his ethnicity, or his professor's, or indeed anyone's, though I lost track of how many times white skin is described in tones of self-conscious reverence. I think that the author is aware that putting an explicit conflict between a rude and sexy maybe-Israeli and a guy who might be Black or Arab or maybe Indian would instantly commit her to a narrative she'd rather avoid—namely, one that can be argued with. Similarly, the book has a trauma plot so clumsily written it made me feel a bit embarrassed to read, but the trauma itself is only ever glanced at; it could be argued that the trauma is the main reason for the novel's dissociative affect, but why bother arguing when we're given so little to work with? I am sure Williams read Parul Sehgal's piece, and I am equally sure that it influenced the on-page cowardice that leads her to write passages like, "Whenever I tried to imagine the house, its image receded. Even when I had lived within its walls something had always stood in the way of my grasping its nature, and so my vision of our family home was of little more than a sequence of dim rooms with high ceilings, each one somehow more hostile than the last, and though to another’s eyes they would have passed without distinction as nothing but neutral surfaces, for me those quiet rooms were filled with horror, albeit one that remained nameless, as I could never quite remember the things that had happened inside them." This is an eminently skimmable novel because the author's own disinterest in or embarrassment about half of its contents is very noticeable. You can feel the moment her own attention slides off the page.

This inattention makes the brief moments of specificity all the more painful, and I don't mean that in a laudatory way. Agathe and her boss both have a prurient interest in disability. There are appalling speeches about autism and leering descriptions of physical disability. I'm disinterested in, shall we say, vivisecting such language from the perspective of the author's psychology; this is precisely the behavior the novel fumblingly attempts to critique, and it's boring. But human psychology is instructive here. Horror is a genre of decision: what details to include and what to hint at. When and how often to show the monster. How to ensure a reasonable portion of the audience sees the ghost, when you still want most of them to only notice something unsettlingly off. Gothic fiction isn't always horror, but it does always engage with horror, and many of the same rules apply. A big scary house with bad memories associated with it isn't meaningful if you can't be bothered to actually write about the house. A decaying city sinking into vaguely supernatural wildness isn't particularly engaging if we don't have a sense of the foundations before they begin to crack.

I don't know if Williams named herself in reference to Tennessee Williams deliberately, though I can make a guess since she's a playwright herself. (Personally I would have simply admitted to myself that I was English, and kept the name Heather.) But Tennessee Williams understood the point of the Gothic: detail. Quentin Compson doesn't say "I dont hate the region! I dont! I dont!" Stanley Kowalski doesn't yell "Wife!!!" The intentionally nameless narrator of Rebecca doesn't dream of going back to "the estate" again, and the contrast between Manderly in all its awful beauty and the nameless narrator is part of the point. The vagueness of Williams' prose is, again, likely intentionally dissociative, but it communicates a lack of care by the author and cultivates a lack of interest in the reader. The abrupt rupture into hyper-specific monologues about autism produces an effect similar to watching a pimple popping video, and I suspect that, too, was deliberate. But it doesn't work. It makes me think Williams doesn't quite understand why people read novels, or why readers pay attention to anything at all. I mean, if I want to read someone being offensive about autism, I can log onto X: The Everything App. A formally ambitious novel should want more for itself.

The worst part about all of this is that there are occasionally touching and meaningful passages. Overheard stories break up the narration several times, notably written as screenplay-esque dialogue between multiple people who interrupt one another and try to pull the conversation back to their own narratives. Here the author employs the usual tools of our trade to great effect. I haven't seen a review that engages deeply with the (to me, obvious) religious themes yet, but I found the writing moving. Outside these sections, the occasional paragraph lifts its head and remembers to have a body, with flow and spirit. Mostly, though, the text just sort of plods on. Cliches abound. Descriptions barely matter, though they will always mention details you'd expect a filmmaker to notice and would hope a novelist would take more time crafting: "The study lay to the right of the living room and was large and light-filled. It occupied the corner of the southern edge of the house and was lined with windows through which the sun invariably seemed to be shining."

The Vivisectors asks us to reconsider our modern habit of pre-judging, abusing power structures to our own advantage, and refusing to see one another. The book's title is introduced in a rant to this effect, voiced by Agathe's boss in a summary of a conversation, not dialogue, the dominant form of conversation in this book. I suspect this is deliberate, and the author believes she is experimenting with form to communicate something important. Isn't interesting how little of the book contains true dialogue, when the book itself is so concerned with the ways in which we misunderstand and hate one another? Similarly, mirrors are a recurring and obvious motif: what do we see when we look at ourselves? What do we do when we project ourselves on others? But answering these questions requires writing actual scenes or committing yourself, at the level of the sentence fragment, to imbuing your non-scenes with meaning. Williams accomplishes neither. The second paragraph of the novel contains the sentence, "He was a frail man, older than his sister, my mother, by a good twenty years." The entire passage is concerned with Agathe's family; there is no reason to insert "his sister, my mother," when you could communicate this less clumsily two sentences later. The book does not improve from there. It invites close reading and then spurns every attempt at doing so.

At the end of Agathe's boss's rant about vivisectors, Agathe remarks to herself, "I was impressed to discover she had learned a new word, but inside I was thinking that none of this applied to me." The novel's main achievement is making such arrogant contempt incredibly memorable, while lacking the craft to truly examine or transform it.

[Readergirl · 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

[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

[Darryl Suite · Rating 4 out of 5]

I already know this is going to become the most hated book from the Booker longlist lol.

Review to come

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

Admittedly was very surprised to see this longlisted for the Booker Prize, but the extraordinarily polarizing reception to this book is all the more reason to give it a whirl...right!?

Substack | Bookstagram | BookTok | BookTube | Bookshop.org Store | Libro.fm Bonus Offer

[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 defining 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.

[Salomé · Rating 1 out of 5]

A novel so consumed with asking questions that it forgets to tell a story.

« We were Vivisectors, she repeated. We had no idea what we wanted to find, no sense of direction, and so we destroyed other bodies in service of nothing. »

The Vivisectors is undeniably ambitious. It presents a decaying city where an institution has become both cultural identity and governing force, where nature steadily encroaches upon civilization, and where nearly every conversation becomes an opportunity to interrogate academia, class, nationalism, environmentalism, and the ways we construct knowledge. It is a novel fascinated with discourse itself.

The problem is that discourse eventually becomes the entire novel.

Rather than allowing its themes to emerge through character, conflict, or narrative momentum, The Vivisectors articulates them directly. Characters rarely reveal themselves through action; instead, they function as vehicles for competing intellectual positions. The result is a book that constantly tells you what it is examining rather than trusting the reader to arrive there independently. Every metaphor is explained. Every ideological conflict is verbalized.

The novel is also strangely resistant to emotional intimacy. Its narrator maintains such a profound distance from herself and everyone around her that meaningful attachment becomes almost impossible. Detachment can be a deliberate stylistic choice, but here it creates an emotional vacuum at the novel’s centre. I understood the ideas being discussed far more than I understood, or cared about, the people discussing them.

Perhaps the novel’s most interesting quality is its instability of tone. It often feels poised on the edge of satire, exaggerating academic culture, internet discourse, and countries' institutional obsession with prestige until they become absurd. But it reads less like a critique than an extended author manifesto. That uncertainty could have been productive if the novel interrogated it more deeply. Instead, it frequently leaves the reader unsure whether contradictions are intentional or simply unresolved.

Ironically, the novel is at its strongest when it stops talking.

Its descriptions of the city are extraordinary. Gardens consuming stone, neglected architecture collapsing beneath unchecked growth, civilization slowly surrendering to the natural world, these moments possess a gothic beauty that the philosophical conversations never quite achieve. Here, the novel finally embraces “show, don’t tell,” and the result is some of its most compelling writing.

I don’t think The Vivisectors lacks intelligence. If anything, it has too much of it. It anticipates criticism before the reader can formulate it, argues with itself before ideas have space to develop, and layers critique upon critique until every interpretive seat at the table is already occupied.

It’s a novel more interested in examining its own arguments than inhabiting its own world.

I admired its ambition. I appreciated its atmosphere. But I finished it feeling as though I had spent hundreds of pages listening to an exceptionally clever debate instead of experiencing a story.

Booker Prize 2026 longlist

[Rachel Louise Atkin]

Someone tell me if the Doloriad is this bad so I can put it on Vinted

[Pow Wow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty much a book like no other, a gothic, grotesque panorama of times that takes every current discourse in the book and then completely disassociates it into abstraction until all that’s left is a mirror house of reflections and associations. Wonderfully morose, funny, complex and despite its high brow stylings eminently propulsive and readable. The prose is razor sharp, brilliant, heady yet utterly concise and thoroughly enjoyable, never trying to impress, instead simply being confidently impressive all by itself. Won’t be for everyone but the rare novel that makes you believe in the future of the art form.

[Lou · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whoa, what just happened? No idea, the story was lost on me and the audio made me want to nap. Hello 2026 Booker longlist.

[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.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

As it turns out, I did take my uncle’s advice and I’m writing this now. Only it isn’t because I want to write about my mother but because I want to write about my boss and all the things that happened to her the summer my mother tried to kill herself and for once surprised us all.

“I like to call it a metaphysical love story, but nobody's, nobody accepted my suggestion for calling it that in the novel's copy. And I call it that because I think as a novel, it's very concerned with a set of philosophical problems and issues that have interested me for a long time, but it's exploring these things through what on the one hand is quite a classic love story between two individuals.”
Missouri Williams interviewed on London Writers' Salon

Missouri Williams is a writer and editor, from the UK but who lives in Prague, and writes in publications including the Nation, where she has written on the works of Agota Kristof and Thomas Bernhard, the drift (see below) and others.

Her debut The Doloriad was a brilliant choice of winner for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, UK & Ireland, now renamed the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize, a challenging but ambitious novel, best read, per the author, while listening to Sisters of Mercy’s song, “Flood II”.

Writer and critic Lamorna Ash, who was on the judging panel alongside poet Vanessa Onwuemezi and novelist Isabel Waidner, said “That such stylistic power is in service of a plot so strange, counter, original, its mood flashing between the tragic, comic and sublime in the most surprising sequencing, raises The Doloriad’s achievement to something astonishing” and that the judges wanted to celebrate the fact that “indie presses like Dead Ink exist in the publishing industry to support and champion debuts as audacious as this.” The author has acknowledged in the interview linked above that “The process of submission was very brutal. Nobody wanted to publish The Doloriad. It was rejected from basically everywhere until Dead Ink picked it up,” followed by FSG in the US.

The Vivisectors is Williams' second novel - very different, and I suspect more accessible, or acceptable, to a wider audience, but equally brilliant and a strong contender to win the Booker Prize.

The novel shares a title with a short story Williams published in Astra Mag, and Williams has said their are connections between them, in particular similar interests, but stylistically and content wise they differ significantly, and Williams has said how she generally likes to reuse titles, and also character names, the first person narrator of this novel, Agathe, sharing a name with one of the protagonists of The Doloriad.

Williams gives insight into the novel, and its change in direction compared to The Doloriad, in this interview at TANKtv, where she comments “I am interested in books that disturb you in some way. When I say a novel should be provocative, I don’t mean provocative as aggressive, shocking or ugly. I mean it in the sense that it asks something of you as a reader. It invites a response you might not otherwise have had, and ideally, it shows you something new” - and compared to The Doloriad, and the short story, here the provocation is more intellectual than visceral.

The Vivisectors opens:

The morning after my mother finally tried to kill herself my uncle decided to say something to me, although we usually ate breakfast together in silence. Leaning over the dark mahogany table, which I’d taken to draping with one of his own mother’s embroidered tablecloths, he told me that if you wanted to write something terrible about somebody then it was best to use the first person, because they’ll never be able to accept that you were capable of betraying them so utterly, and so instead of seeing the obvious they’ll look at just about anything else. Disguised like this, you could tell whatever story you liked. It was the safest of all forms, my uncle concluded, because to mix up the author and their narrator was the most cardinal of literary errors. His watery grey eyes examined me briefly before drifting in the direction of the garden.

Our narrator, Agathe, lives in an formerly important, now increasingly decaying, city of a once-prominent empire, a city dominated by the university (no one in the city uses its name, as it is the one and only institution of universal importance). Climate change has led to the city becoming increasingly damp, and the thriving plant life is winning the battle with the crumbling buildings. The university itself is increasingly reliant, but equally hostile, to foreign students, and the academic community is rocked, or perhaps fuelled, by an unedifying dispute between one of the foreign students and a professor from a colonised minority group, each accusing the other of prejudicial behaviour. And meanwhile the gardeners form an increasingly militant group battling both the encroaching vegetation as well as the inertia of the university administration.

Now partisans were assembling themselves beneath the banners of the two warring parties, and the administration was anxious. The financial security of the university increasingly relied on the influx of foreign students and its reputation abroad, and yet that reputation also rested on how skilfully the university pretended to make amends to those whom it had wounded most grievously in the past. Jacob had been a shining example - he was one of the youngest professors in the university's long history and had featured heavily in its newsletters and brochures. How the journalists and the tabloids would love to get their hands on this, the academics repeated to one another. If the news of the dispute were to spread more widely, the gardeners would use it against the university. It would confirm everything they had been saying over the past few years: The university could not be trusted to determine its own fate. It was decadent, ridiculous. And in light of the manufactured crises of the media, the revelations that emerged with clockwork regularity every week, and the scandals over syllabi, it was inevitable that some members of the public would take the side of the gardeners and the exhausted city council - a considerable faction, even. Faith in the university had been continuously and ruthlessly destabi-lised by those who ought to have known better. Even worse, my boss said, was the fact that some of the academics were clearly having fun. There was a theatrical aura surrounding the whole thing. The drama in the department was a chance to escape the endless drudgery of pointless work, the ceaseless production of papers and monographs that nobody would bother to read. For some time the morale of the university had depended on the relief provided by its internal schisms.

Agathe works as an assistant for a professor at the university, indeed basically does the entirety of job for her, who becomes involved on the side of the foreign student, Adam, (the professor sharing his nationality) and eventually involves Agathe in this relationship.

And meanwhile Agathe is dealing with her hostile father (who suggest a traumatic event in her past that led him to remove all the staircases from their house) and her mother, crippled physically and mentally by her suicide attempt.

But much of the novel is philosophical. Agathe studies the work of John Donne and Williams has said how her novel was influenced by Plato's Republic.

Although any dryness in the text is broken up by a brilliant use of Greek choruses - one involving gardeners, another foreign students (which includes poetic input from some mould on the room of the student's damp accommodation) and a group of academics assembled by Agathe's uncle.

Though this is also at times - particularly per the narrator's own avowed refusal to follow conventional forms - a somewhat anti-novel and it may not be for those looking for plot or sympathetic characters. In a 2022 article in the drift, 'Form is Back' Williams commented that:

“Novels have become interesting again, and just in time. Readers have finally had enough of the self and its dilemmas, and writers have become less afraid of upsetting them, or of testing their patience. The protagonist of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, Mira, is drawn up into a leaf where she undertakes interminable philosophical dialogues with her dead father (who also lives in the leaf), while the narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 is not afraid to speak in the first person plural, nor to describe the ramblings of a decadent Venetian — or Viennese, if the mood takes her — idiot called Tarquin Superbus for a cool thirty pages. Things feel less didactic, more obscure. You’re the one who has to find a meaning in all this. Form is back.”

'Form is back' is a great literary manifesto and this is a welcome inclusion on a great Booker longlist. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.

I asked her what had happened between Adam and the other professor. I wanted to know what they had said. My boss hesitated. She said she knew what attitudes were like, especially among young people. We were highly strung and we constantly assumed bad faith. We thought people said the worst things deliberately and that even the most casual exchange was riddled with secret meanings that had to be uncovered and dissected. Like vivisectors, we analysed a situation until we had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels. And once we had found what we wanted, we did what we wanted. We excluded people and ostracised them until they became the worst versions of themselves. We refused to let goodness thrive and we wanted nothing more than to cut people down for the slightest error, the smallest slip.

[cass krug · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was a slog to get through for me. the writing style was very tell, not show and the narrator is so deeply removed from emotion and the people around her that it makes it difficult to care about her. i can’t really explain what the plot is about. lots of esoteric rants about the academic world coming into conflict with the nature that is threatening to overtake the crumbling city the book is set in. the descriptions of nature and the setting were probably my favorite part of the book. everything else was too vague and vibey.

thank you to MCD and netgalley for the digital copy! publishes may 26

[Matt Bender · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most surprising book I’ve read this year. I think Vivisectors is brilliant. It’s being marketed as a satire and campus novel and it’s not. It’s more of a gothic fable that portrays the social ills and loss of meaning in western society. It’s also concerned with existential meaning, particularly how the recognition of humanity in others is essential for individual meaning.

There are some obvious literary influences. In tone and content, The Vivisectors is a lot like Satantango. Similarly to the way Krasznahorkai rendered the moral decay and social ills of Soviet society, Williams has constructed a recognizable model of a neoliberal dystopia. It is aggressively egotistical, immoral, and dysfunctional. The university stands in as the moral and cultural organ (with a heavy use of ivory tower and walled garden metaphors) and is distinctly nationalistic.

Williams is also noticeably focused on language and how meaning can be lost in abstraction and uses tons of figurative language that creates a mythic atmosphere. It reminds me of Clarice Lispector, there are a lot of religious allusions and a sense of searching for some reason to be optimistic in a way that is spiritual but secular.

So there are a lot of layers to decode here. I think that’s why there have been some contrarian (and somewhat baffling) reviews of the novel. Despite a narrator who performs withdrawal and is aggressively focused on self-annihilating, and the many critiques of the present, I didn’t sense the novel is a meant to be a requiem. Especially toward the end, there are many notes that remind us not to lose faith.

[plukereads]

minčių begalė, visos padrikos, taip keistai pabaigus tekstą nesijaučiau tikriausiai nuo 4.48 psychosis

[Annaliese · Rating 1 out of 5]

Edit to add: The Vivisectors has been longlisted for the Booker Prize.

The Vivisectors begins with a grad student living in a city which is quickly becoming overrun by plants. The vines and grasses threaten the structural integrity of buildings and cover the roads and paths, and the only thing that can keep them at bay are gardeners, a class of people that are seen as the sort of natural opposition to the academics in the city’s university. Our grad student, Agathe, props up the career of her professor boss (known only in the book as “My Boss”) while simultaneously grappling with family trauma (notably, her mother making a suicide attempt right at the beginning of the book) and witnessing the reclaiming of her city to the earth.

I will go ahead and say that I really looked forward to this book because of the concept of campus novel meets futuristic sci-fi(?), but once I started it, I dreaded picking it up again. It is in constant defiance of “show, don’t tell”, which is made especially worse by an unmemorable and unsympathetic main character/narrator. The prose is overwrought, over dramatic, aiming for something high-concept but floundering. And the plot is just nothing…just nothing. I reached a little over halfway and skimmed the rest; I hate to do it but there are just too many books in my list to waste my time on something I don’t enjoy (although I do appreciate the opportunity for an ARC, as I quite usually admire the work that FSG publishes).

Unfortunately, I would not recommend this to my audience, but I am all in encouragement of trying it out anyway. I hope many readers do find enjoyment in this one, but regrettably it was not enough to keep me on board.

I received an eARC from NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in exchange for an honest review.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

“There’s so much to tell, and what I ought to do is show.”

Overcrowded with ideas, critiques, self-critiques, and meta-critiques. Almost as if every chair at the reading table has already been occupied by the novel debating with itself. I don’t feel the need to reread it, like I did with The Doloriad, which felt like a whole weird world inviting rediscovery even before turning the last page. The Vivisectors feels more preoccupied with examining arguments and anticipating its own reception than creating a fictional world. Which is not inherently bad...

The wheelbarrow’s return stood out to me, though. That image alone carried more weight (no pun intended) than the novel’s self-explanatory machinery!

[Io · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely adore this book for its interiority and surreality, for the way it subverts and vivisects the ultimately meaningless yet hyper-charged conflict between a professor and student. The dialogue sections, between the scholars, gardeners, students, and mold spores, were all mesmerizing, and I love the iterations of twisted "not-love" stories being told, as the human and plant worlds clash in a strange political struggle between gardeners and intellectuals. I was fascinated by the way the narrative tells a story that disowns the relevance of stories, while also acknowledging their inevitability.

I began the book feeling that the narrator was clearly being coded as neurodivergent, and then was surprised to find her observing and commenting upon a nonverbal autistic child. Her boss who was already shown to be both superficial and problematic also makes some superficial and problematic comments about autism, unfortunately. Internalized and externalized abelism abound. But the narrator's struggle is highly relatable to an undiagnosed autistic experience, as much as the novel itself seems to want to dissect the pointlessness of diagnoses in the post-apocalyptic decay. The narrator's father is obsessed with misunderstanding his daughter, in projecting an endless amount of negative emotions upon her for her unwillingness to perform for and engage with him, to provide a clear enough answer for why she is the way that she is; he endlessly points to a trauma that she disowns as unimportant, contrary to the idea that as a "vivisector" she should be concerned about forming an identity from her own story and using it to stake some claim in the world. Agathe stakes no claim on anything but she manages not to be the universal narrator the literary criticism within the novel so openly derides.

[Christine Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t Judge This Book by the Cover

The Vivisectors unfolds in a timeless university city collapsing under vegetation, its fraudulent academics locked in futile struggle with insurgent gardeners, and its protagonist Agathe resisting desire even as she is drawn into revolution. At its heart, the novel is a jagged collision of two damaged people, set against a backdrop of decay, cynicism, and the disruptive force of love.

I don’t usually read surreal, allegorical novels, and at first I wasn’t sure how to take The Vivisectors. I read it straight through once, then circled back to certain passages, and on rereading they did settle into clarity. What had seemed opaque began to cohere, as the book revealed its design. I still felt outside my usual genre, but the effort was rewarded: the strangeness resolved into meaning, and the allegory lingered.

Williams’s choice of title says it all: these characters are vivisectors, cutting into each other’s lives with surgical cruelty. The word evokes both literal dissection and ruthless analysis, and the novel revels in that double edge. It’s about the vivisection of intimacy, family, and society itself.

Near the end, Williams breaks the fourth wall, collapsing the boundary between story and audience. She closes with the parable of the white whale, a story that refracts the novel’s themes. For some, the whale is obsession and futility, the unreachable thing pursued endlessly; for others, it is optimism and hope, a luminous horizon that keeps belief alive. The parable leaves the reader with a symbol that shines with meaning but resists a single interpretation.

The dust jacket varies by publisher. I was lucky to get the MCD edition, because the hideous one—with a Caravaggio on the cover—was so off‑putting I probably would have skipped the book entirely. To me, it felt like a warning label.

Prize note: The Vivisectors was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.

[Mara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt as if Williams wrote a whole lot of nothing but yet so much at the same time, and this is also exactly how I feel about the narrator, Agathe, who is emotionally reclusive, withdrawn, and uses extreme detachment to survive this world she’s ultimately built for us to witness with her. This makes The Vivisectors feel, if not stale, then hard to connect with because Agathe said so much but SO LITTLE. Her perspective of other people is the only thing that allows you to glean much of anything.

On the surface, this feels like beautiful word vomit. But as you keep reading, the imagery that Williams uses allows us to feel the suffocation that was happening in this story of elitism, oligarchy, and oppression. Williams uses this almost “unbiased” and almost “unperturbed” voice as a witness, while also disguising this story of social class, hierarchy, and the fragility of the world within this contained academic setting. What feels like a twisted dark academia in this dome of a university town is a smaller-scale version of our world. And even though it took more words and meandering than needed, Williams was able to, after more or less 70% of the way through her story, show us the rot, farce, and act that people are willing to be a part of to keep a dying legacy alive.

[Diana · Rating 1 out of 5]

tänavuste bookeri nominentide lugemine ei ole alanud paljutõotavalt.

williams talutab lugejat kättpidi ühe ebavajaliku lahtiseletava remargi juurest järgmiseni, riivamisi tabab sealjuures üht-kaht potentsiaalselt huvitavat ideed, aga raputab need kohe narratiivi küljest lahti.

siin on nii palju ülevalgustatud metafoore ja motiive, mis oma korduvuses ja läbinähtavuses hakkavad kiiresti väsitama ja tekitavad tunde, et autor ei usalda lugejat või, veel hullem, iseennast.

ärritav on ka pidev eneseteadlik ironiseerimine kaasaegse kirjanduse võimetuse kohta midagi öelda või kedagi kõnetada - mida saab lugeja kritiseerida raamatus, mis on ise kogu oma küündimatuse muiates juba tema ette laiali laotanud. see on üks tüütumaid trende viimase kümnendi litfic’is, mille surma ma ei jõua ära oodata.

see oleks okei keskkooli lõpukirjand, aga on kesine bookeri nominent.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

happy booker prize season to all those who celebrate! booker prize 2026 longlist 1/13. woof. i actually picked this up from the library before the longlist was announced because the concept sounded interesting, but this was a total fucking flop. how do you make a book about the plants taking over a city so goddamn boring???? i fear this will be this year’s flesh & go far even tho it was a total pretentious nothingburger full of monologues about absolutely fucking nothing. if this is book 1 of the longlist i am very scared for the rest….

[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

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wheelbarrow makes a return! Love to see it!

[katie?]

this is one of those books that i can't write a real review for until i read it again which will be soon but just know that i have not been this compelled by a book in a MINUTE and i'm still lost among the overgrown gardens and cloisters of the crumbling university in my imagination

[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.

[zarina muhammad · Rating 5 out of 5]

actually this was a really weird and beautiful love story?? i guess that is a kind of spoiler but nvm. loved the weird back n forth about out of control gardens and out of control cities, because i think about cities and gardens a lot and this was thinking about them too in a really unusual and essential way.