Come Join Our Disease

by Sam Byers

Sam Byers's mastery of tone and attentiveness to every psychological shift confirms him as one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation.' Sunday Times

The new novel from the author of Perfidious Albion-a darkly comic and profoundly affecting novel about resistance, radicalism and redemption.

Maya is homeless. When her site is razed by ruthless authorities, she's detained. But then, Maya is given a lifeline; a chance to re-enter society again. A tech company - angling to raise its philanthropic profile - offers her a job and a flat. There's one caveat: Maya must document her inspiring progress on Instagram to show that anyone can be productive; perfect.

Yet Maya realises that sickness is a kind of revolution. With other outcasts, Maya starts a movement: billboards promoting wellness are defaced all over London and her media feed is flooded with obscene, filthy images. Suddenly, questions arise about the forces unleashed: liberation and madness, protest and anarchy, rebellion and chaos.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Horror, Audiobook, Mental Health, Mental Illness

368 pages, ebook

First published March 16, 2021

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the encampment she’s living in is razed, a homeless woman, Maya, receives a proposal from a Google-esque tech giant: a home, a job and all expenses paid in return for documenting her ‘journey’ on social media. As much as Maya distrusts authority, it’s an offer anyone in her position would find difficult to turn down. She accepts, and inevitably finds the reality disappointing. Her job – moderating offensive photos posted online – is grim, her flat is shabby, and she’s immediately reprimanded if she doesn’t update Instagram often enough. It’s better than sleeping rough, though, and Maya settles into her new life, taking a kind of masochistic pleasure in the demanding routines of work (and punishing yoga classes).

If the first stretch of Maya’s narrative reads like an edgier take on the kind of modern ennui endemic in 21st-century fiction, what comes next is altogether wilder. After returning from an enforced trip to a sadistic detox facility, she makes herself ill by bingeing on junk food. At the resulting doctor’s appointment, she meets a kindred spirit, Zelma, who lives with chronic pain. Together they begin their own small anti-wellness movement, beginning with guerrilla art, which spirals into ever-more scatological acts of rebellion. (I was entirely unprepared for how much shitting this story would involve.) Soon, their private revolution goes public, prompting a more extreme shift in the way both women live.

Come Join Our Disease is a sly and insidious sort of book. It starts recognisably; at the beginning, I was preparing to mentally file it alongside a collection of other novels of life in modern London (and its underbelly) that might also include Will Wiles’ Plume, Luiza Sauma’s Everything You Ever Wanted and Gary Budden’s London Incognita. The early stages of Maya and Zelma’s celebration of excess also reminded me of Lara Williams’ Supper Club. But, by the halfway point, the story has transformed into something unlike any other book I have read: something primal and transcendentally disgusting, climaxing in scenes so repulsive the mind’s eye baulks at them, while providing undeniable joy and liberation for the characters; an ecstasy of filth.

One morning, having been reading the book the night before, I woke up thinking this vision of a shit-streaked, rat-infested room piled with rotting food was a horrible nightmare I’d had, before remembering: it was my mental image of Maya and Zelma’s squat, a setting we are exclusively confined to for almost a hundred pages. I have to admit that this section of the book took me quite a while to get through. It is designed to repel, and some readers are really going to hate it. That disgust is the point, though. In making herself useless to society, is Maya finally free, or simply trapped in a different kind of hell?

As the blurb puts it, Come Join Our Disease is ‘a book about freedom, and how much of it any of us can truly withstand’. This is a fearless novel, unafraid of repugnance, unafraid of questions, unafraid of not having the answers. And I haven’t even mentioned the writing yet: the lightning-bolt sentences that capture ideas within vivid images. I would say it’s like reading a really lurid, disgusting, fun, impassioned essay, but most people probably don’t want essays from their fiction. (Though maybe this is a novel for those who do?) As ever, Byers is a writer whose fiction entertains as much as it provokes.

I received an advance review copy of Come Join Our Disease from the publisher through NetGalley.

TinyLetter | Linktree

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 rounded down

Sigh. I really wanted to love this novel, having throughly enjoyed Sam Byers last novel, Perfidious Albion - a bracing satire on post-Brexit Britain.

It's clear Byers likes to write zeitgeisty novels set in the UK, and Come Join Our Disease follows in PA's footsteps in that regard: we meet the protagonist, Maya, just before she is detained when the illegal encampment she is living in is raided by police. Having become homeless for a year after losing her job, Maya is earmarked during her detainment for participation in a program which will help get her back on her feet - she is given a job and a place to live, and exchange for these she is required to post about her resultant "journey" on Instagram. Things seem initially to be going ok, until Maya becomes unwell after going on a yoga retreat and doing a juice detox (at the behest of her benefactors). At the GP's she meets a woman, Zelma, who is unemployed and on benefits and living with chronic pain and spends her time wandering the streets of London and defacing adverts, billboards and images in magazines which promote "impossible wellness". Maya feels drawn to Zelma, and she begins to participate in Zelma's work.

This all takes place in the first 50% of the novel, however at the halfway point the novel takes a much darker turn. In summary, Maya and Zelma create a commune where they (and eventually four other women) live an existence which is the absolute opposite to the Instagram aesthetic. At this point the novel gets very dark, disgusting, graphic and repetitive: if you're at all squeamish about maggots or rats I would advise avoiding the book all together. I've never read a book with so many references to faeces in my life, and at times it all felt like some awful fever dream I would never escape.

If I was rating purely on the first half of the book I'd probably rate Come Join Our Disease 3.5* - I felt the first 50% was very well done, and accurately depicted the ennui and malaise of those who are disillusioned by having to be seen to enjoy a mundane job and live up to some Instagram ideal of life. Unfortunately things fell apart in the second half and I failed to see that the rest of the book lived up to what the first half promised and felt like it was leading to: the blurb states that the novel is about "freedom, and how much of it any of us can truly withstand", and while I guess I kind of get what Byers was trying to say to a certain extent with regard to this and the commune Zelma and Maya create (they're entirely at their own whim and yet still not happy - so we all need some sort of structure in our lives?!), it all gets lost as the second half continues, with the preoccupation with defecating and in-fighting between the women becoming way too much for my interest to be sustained.

So overall, a mixed bag. If the blurb appeals, maybe give the book a go - perhaps a lot of it went over my head and there's something deeper to be found in women rolling around in their own filth.

Thank you Netgalley and Faber and Faber for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion was one of my favourite novels I read in 2018, so I was eager to read Come Join Our Disease. I found them two very different reading experiences. Perfidious Albion is an incisive examination of surveillance capitalism, the politics of brexit, and England's social fractures, with a large cast of characters. Come Join Our Disease is much narrower, told in the first person by a single narrator, and deals with wellness, mental health, and precarity. I think both capture something of the zeitgeist of the year they were published and, frankly, that's pretty alarming. Although Perfidious Albion was hardly a fun read, Come Join Our Disease was much more difficult and I found it genuinely disturbing. Yet this did not put me off reading the latter 300 pages in an afternoon. The narrative is very compelling, despite being deliberately repulsive. It must be quite difficult to write a shocking, taboo-breaking novel these days. I think Sam Byers has managed it here, though.

Maya, the protagonist of Come Join Our Disease, is homeless as the novel opens. When the camp she lives in is destroyed by police, a tech company offers her a flat and job as part of a charity programme they run. In return, she has to record her inspiring journey on instagram. Her job consists of moderating endless social media images for porn, abuse, violence, etc. The company that employs her (neatly named Pict) sends their employees on compulsory wellness retreats as a spurious gesture towards supporting their wellbeing. After attending one of these appalling retreats, Maya and a friend decide to rebel against work, health, and society in general by moving to a squat and letting themselves decay. They refuse to wash and live in their own filth, glorying in shit, piss, vomit, menstrual blood, and rotting food. This is all described unsparingly. Despite being fairly squeamish, I coped with it. If you can stomach The Wasp Factory and/or Gravity's Rainbow you'll be OK, but do not attempt to read it immediately after a meal.

What I found most unusual and interesting was Byers' unflinching depiction of female nihilism. I've noticed that hopelessness and meaninglessness are highly gendered in fiction. There are masses of novels about male nihilism, indeed many of the novels written by men in English or French during the past 70 years have such themes. It isn't particularly transgressive for fictional men to stop taking care of themselves or retreat from society; they usually also drink a lot and commit arbitrary acts of violence. For a woman to be dirty, disgusting, and not care about it remains pretty shocking and far fewer novels concern themselves with this. After forensically depicting wellness (juices, yoga, mindfulness, and all), Come Join Our Disease makes this contrast especially vivid:

"Fucking ideas," I raged one night, my voice caroming off the wall beside me and raising a black cloud of bluebottles from its film of filth. "Why must there always be ideas?"
"But didn't you want..." said Zelma, her voice thin, her breath damp against my thigh, where she'd rested her head.
"I didn't want anything!" I shouted. "I don't want anything! I want nothing. I want to know, just once, what it feels like, what it means, when everything just falls away. Why can't I have that? Why is nothing too much to ask for?"
Zelma looked up from my leg and nodded. Across her face, a shadow of sadness moved at speed, as if thrown by a racing sun.
"No-one gets to make no decisions," she said flatly, "No-one gets to be nothing."
And then she clenched, gasped, and rolled away to be breathlessly sick.

The revolting sequence after Maya returns from the retreat will be hard for me to forget. Reading a narrative of self-destruction full of disgusting details initially reminded me of every Chuck Palahniuk novel I've got through. But Come Join Our Disease has more introspection and none of Palahniuk's sometimes-tiresome whimsy; it felt more meaningful than gratuitous. Although the style is very different, I subsequently realised that it resembles Murata Sayaka's Earthlings - also a disturbing and nihilistic tale about rejecting social norms.

One theme that Byers covers brilliantly in both Perfidious Albion and Come Join Our Disease is that work under surveillance capitalism is hell. Maya's boss is a needle-sharp pastiche of the tech startup ethos:

"Something I like to say is that doing the job, even doing the job really well, is only like sixty per cent of the job," he said.
He was looking at me as if I was supposed to offer my thoughts on the other forty per cent, but my mind was empty. I had become distracted by the wider implications of my job as no longer being the whole of my job, and so had nothing to contribute in terms of what other work, what other input and effort, I might possibly be able to offer.
"Is this about attitude?" I said.
Harrison stared at me flatly. Because of my levelled voice and ground-down affect, the statement had come across with something of a bad attitude itself.
"I mean..." I tried to brighten my inflection. I felt as if I was reaching into myself and dredging up silty handfuls of personality, stuff that had resided too long at the bottom of the well. "Maybe attitude isn't the word. Maybe the word I'm looking for is personality. Or character."
At this last word, Harrison brightened perceptibly. I felt like I was cracking a safe - spinning through combinations, listening for the click of the pins in their barrel.

I also liked this insight into the feeling of posting something you care about on social media:

I awoke to no real scandal. [...] As I thought about it, though, in bed, scrolling through my feed, I realised I had not really been expecting these things at all. I had been hoping for them. The fizz and faint shudder I'd felt at posting that picture wasn't, as I'd told myself at the time, fear. It wasn't even quite excitement. It was relief - a physical reaction to the sense of freedom that accompanied posting something I believed in and was proud of. This, after all, was what other people used their social media for, wasn't it? Surely not everyone felt as forced as I did to curate such a carefully inoffensive feed? My hope for a strong response to the image, I realised, was complicated. I wanted to know that I'd transgressed, wanted the thrill of bad behaviour, but I also wanted to know that the image me and Zelma had created carried some kind of power, and that the platform on which we'd presented it was a meaningful way of expressing that power. Instead, I was disappointed, and in my disappointment I could see clearly, perhaps for the first time, the things that I had wished for. It was confirmation that I craved. Confirmation that something, anything I was doing mattered; that I was not simply overseeing some meaningless, lifeless stream of corporatised lifestyle flotsam, then passing my time at night by daubing a few billboards with what effectively amounted to graffiti - passed by and overlooked by hundreds on their way to work.

I think that Perfidious Albion captured something of the brexit zeitgeist and Come Join Our Disease includes elements of pandemic zeitgeist: it is claustrophobic and obsessed with embodiment. COVID-19 has certainly provoked a sense of being trapped both in our homes and in our bodies. I did wonder whether novelists might write about the pandemic in such a way. The nihilism about wellness also feels timely. The idea that you can diet and yoga yourself into productive perfection is especially surreal and absurd during a global pandemic. In a sense, Come Join Our Disease is a book about trying to reject Foucault's concept of biopower. Despite this, there was less about chronic illness than I expected. Zelma is chronically ill and cannot work, but as she doesn't narrate she remains somewhat in the background. Her relationship with Maya is nonetheless important to the narrative and surprisingly sweet. Amid the filth and decay of their little commune, there are some lovely moments of friendship and solidarity. The ending, however, is not hopeful.

Once the filth commune is broken up by police, Maya is sectioned and loses contact with the others. After performing recovery correctly, she gets released and immediately funnelled into another corporate charity programme. Her former boss, in a hamfisted effort at atonement, tries tracing Zelma for her. Maya learns that Zelma has starved to death after her benefits were cut off. This discovery is incredibly bleak, yet horribly convincing. Maya then ends the novel with other former commune members, running a wellness retreat based on their experience. They have commoditised their rejection of hygiene into the same format as the retreat that triggered it in the first place. I was impressed by how fitting this ending was. It really illustrates how rapidly transgressive attempts to reject society become products under capitalism. There is the possibility of retreat-attendees experiencing something genuinely transformative by confronting their bodily fluids, but it seems likely to wear off quickly. Byers appears pessimistic about the potential for lasting resistance. The importance of friendship still provides a little light in an otherwise very dark and disturbing novel, though. I cannot recommend Come Join Our Disease as unequivocally as Perfidious Albion. It is not easy to read and I suspect some people might, reasonably enough, give up in disgust. I do not regret persisting, as I found it very thought-provoking, but there are certainly images I'd much rather forget.

[Tom Mooney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Promising start but soon disappears up its own arse.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book that was very easy to admire, but also an emotionally difficult book to read, one dipped into a few times a week over a couple of months. Its relentless cheerlessness made me yearn for Mr. Byers's "early, funny ones" (as a fan says to the suddenly-serious "auteur" Alvy Singer in Stardust Memories, itself a madcap homage to Fellini), Idiopathy and Perfidious Albion, which instantly made him one of my favourite young writers, but it was not to be: no, this book wanted to do something else entirely with that ol' Weltanschauung (and everything else) of mine, damnit.

I won't spoil what it does do with the Passions of the Soul other than to say it runs over them with some serious heavy equipment—then backs up over them just to make sure they've been properlyt flattened. Eventually, later, much past half-way, you come to like and then desire that feeling (I'm still not sure how he did it). And then you're sad that that it's over, glad for the 3rd novel's change of pace and emotional space, if still pining just a wee bit for those earlier, funny ones.

But there is not one sentence in this novel that is anything other than as taut as the Stax studio house rhythm section—as is to always be expected from Mr. Byers.

[Tina · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I read the blurb for this book I thought it would be right up my street - we follow Maya, a woman who has lived on the streets for a year following some money problems, she’s taken under the wing of a big company who want to “help” her get a home, job, and re enter everyday society.


First things first: this book has a lot of triggers so tw for: eating disorders, depression, abusive relationships, child pornography.


This book was extremely difficult to read, not due to subject matter (though the constant extremely detailed scenes about poop, vomiting, and sty like living conditions did not help) but because I felt the book exaggerated commercialism to an extent that was unbelievable. I could understand what the main character was going through and feeling but the author gave mixed signals as to what the message of the book should be: fight against commercialism or how people suffer from ill mental health or how to care for others? It seems like the author tried to hit all three complex points with one book and it wasn’t clear what I should take away.

The writing style was very aggressive, a male writing from a female’s perspective with all male characters being saviours and all female characters SEEMING strong but not quite - it didn’t come across well at all.


Wouldn’t read again. I only read to the end to see how the author would end it and it was disappointing.

[Laura Hughes · Rating 1 out of 5]

My first dnf of the year. This was so awful. Just revolting. I managed about 100 pages and was left feeling physically sick. I don’t want to spend my free time reading about mentally ill women rolling around in their own filth, it’s just disgusting. The blurb was very promising which is why I think I feel so strongly about this whole book. It could have been great. But no, it’s just full of sick and poo and self indulgent nonsense. Don’t bother.

[Ann (Inky Labyrinth) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite brilliant and equally disgusting.

Fantastic writing but the plot in the last half lost me--it took way too long to get where we ended up.

[Deb Lonnon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book reviews 42/2021 'come join our disease' Sam Byers

CONTENT WARNING: LOTS OF BODILY FLUIDS

I am torn. I feel there is something really important about consumerism, the 'wellness' industry, social media presenting an airbrushed sunshiney reality, mental illness, cults, homelessness and societal outsiders in this book, while also feeling a sliding discomfort that there will be a lot of men wanking into fistfuls of their own faeces while unsteadily turning the pages of this book.

Premise: Maya is homeless, she is 'saved' found a flat, given a job in return for documenting her journey, her progress on Instagram. Her job is reviewing image after image of transgressive pornography or violence or breastfeeding mothers or gay men kissing at their wedding and determining which are obscene and banned form the clients social media and which can stay.

Her life is curated. She is sent to a wellness retreat full of yoga and kale smoothies and lives in a semi communal setting, too polite to fart in front of other women. When she is released she binge eats and then manifests a 'cathedral' of shit.

She meets a girl. The girl is a banksyesque figure, altering advertising to reflect the kind of images Maya rejects on a daily basis. Maya posts some of these on her Instagram. The girl is wild and authentic, she wants Maya to send her photos of her shit. 🙄 I see a bit of a theme developing. There is a bit of a poo obsession going on.

It's uncomfortable reading, but mental illness is challenging and uncomfortable. There is a release in the central characters understanding of her refusal to engage in society to such a degree that she regresses into a state of illness and decay, but it still has an undercurrent of wanting her to conform that I find uncomfortable as I consider myself non-conformist, just not to the degree of setting up a refusenik commune in a warehouse, eating mouldy leftover takeaways, wearing a necklace of dead rats and rolling around in my own shit.

I also have disquiet that a man writing a book with female characters at its centre and with the men two dimensionally portrays as peripheral at best has not treated his female characters *well* but I also feel there's a bit of a radfem bit of me that would never be happy, no matter what he did.

I think it's a 3, because it was a bit of a chore in places, but once you understand how unwell Maya is, you open up to the book a bit more. Lots to think about.

Probably won't be made into a film. If it is, Scarlett Johansson should either be advised to stay well clear OR scoop up an Oscar nomination..

[Sein Einsiedler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never seen a book be so poorly rated for achieving its desired impression. This book is grotesque and ugly. That’s the point. A narratively confused ending holds this book back from giving the reader a satisfactory ending. If I were to really think about it, some points in the second half can be a little repetitive, the story can feel stagnant. However in some sense, I think that’s the point, to wallow.

[Tracy Hollen]

Nope. I made it to THE part and couldn’t continue.

[Eskay · Rating 1 out of 5]

this novel contains literal shit eating, but that's not my problem with it.

it just feels so disingenuous! here is a group of women who want to 'live outside the system' and wallow in their own filth (absolutely literally) in part as a direct protest against how adverts make women feel bad about their body but they are fucking posting the whole thing to instagram??? they all remain so plugged into the system, even though they claim they are raging against it (and why do all these types of novels seem to assume that they're something revolutionary about doing drugs and drinking to excess - there is not) the moment i wanted to throw the book in the bin was when two of the women turn up with food they have received from a food bank, when they're getting sent bottles of champagne from their instagram fans. what is the rubbish???? what it is saying??? and then it all ends with them getting involved in a tumblr based shit eating cult, and this seems to be saying this is a sad ending for them all, but how is it any different to where they were before?? they were always profiting off their 'rejection of society'.

also, and maybe this comes from reading this directly after all's well by mona awad, but even if i knew nothing about sam byers, it's very, very obvious he is not a woman with a chronic illness. while we are not a monolith, the character of zelma makes absolutely no sense as a woman in chronic pain (but then neither does our protagonist maya, because it seems byers hasn't bothered given anyone much of a backstory) zelma doesn't really get a voice re: her 'mysterious' illness, even though arguably that fits it better than maya's paper thin backstory as a woman who wants to live outside of her body.

in short, i would only recommend this book if you really want to read paragraph long descriptions of what poo looks like.

[Michelle N · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm so conflicted. This book was really hard to get through. I felt repulsed and sick every time I picked it up.

I'm curious as to what the author had gone through to write this. I wonder if he's been to psychiatric ward before. I get that this is fiction, but the depictions of nurses, medication, and meditation didn't sit right with me. I think if I read this book in 2021, when it was published, I would have struggled even more after coming out of the covid lockdowns.

This book was disgusting, but I felt like it could have gone a step further. What about septicaemia - isn't bacteria entering the bloodstream deadly? What about gangrene? Surely someone would have had to saw off a limb and do some awful makeshift amputation? I hated reading this, but I think the author could have gone into the science of decay a bit more.

This book was thought-provoking but maybe I missed the message.

I really liked the dystopian vibes (whoa corporations wanting to look good by making a homeless woman reenter society and giving her an office job - but the catch is that she has to become a living advertisement). I sent into a deep rage every single time Ryan and Seth spoke.

I'm still confused about what Maya was fighting for (or against? -- it probably more so against something than for anything). I can see that she hated the sterilised, whitewashed, and stale structures of her new life. It seemed fake and nobody really seemed happy. But then she sorta imposes her idea of freedom (which I don't think she knows what it is other than being the opposite of being trapped and inauthentic?) onto others. I guess people had the choice to join the cult - but if you're isolated, constantly high, sleep-deprived, malnutritioned and a bunch of other things I can't imagine you're capacitated to make decisions, let alone think.

Or maybe the message is that: decay is essential and inevitable? So do whatever you want because it means nothing and everything all at once. But also make sure it’s profitable because capitalism always wins?

I don't think I'm sleeping tonight.

[Ian McQuaid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings on this one. The first third, dealing with a formerly homeless woman finding herself given a 'second chance' by a handful of tech giants, touches on themes recognisable from Byers' previous (and superior imo) book Perfidious Albion- namely empty managerial jargon masquerading as human connection, notions of self branding as self care, and the pervasive intrusion of the tech industry into all aspect of our being.

But where PA ratcheted up the farcical comic elements in its satire of corporate dystopia, CJOD takes an unpredictable and frankly bizarre turn into a second part that is based in a commune of women who have rejected the antiseptic wellness and body beautiful self-improvement society demands of them in the most extreme way possible; eating rotten food, pissing themselves, rolling around in their own turds and puke. It's reminiscent of a feminist take on Fight Club, with its themes of finding gender identity in opposition to neo liberal conformity; Shite Club if you will (sorry couldn't stop myself).

Personally I enjoyed this second part if only because it was just so utterly random- I had no idea what was going to happen, but... increasingly I also had no idea what the point was either. None of the characters (perhaps with the exception of the overly aggro squat veteran) seemed at all believable, so I have to wonder why Byers gathered together a load of cyphers and made them bathe in cack for a hundred pages.. I mean what is the actual point? The dialogue was ...ok.. and there was a couple of interesting barbs at how social media rewards mental breakdown, but other than that it was just really grim for no clear point. After a few truly gross moments, the drama kinda peters out, and I found myself forcing myself through the last pages, monumentally uninvested in what might happen next to a character who I didn't believe in. Overall, an oddity, and one I can't help feel might have been better as a short story at best- maybe worth reading for sheer bafflingness? 3 and a half stars seems fair

[Hannah Gordon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really liked the premise of this book and was interested to see where it went but I couldn’t get past the 5 page (on Kobo) graphic description of diarrhoea and subsequent eating of it, then the 5 or so pages of graphic description of vomiting after she’s eaten her own faeces. Wtf?!

In terms of plot, I found it hard to believe that 1 year of homelessness (after 30+ years of “normal” life) had changed the character so much that she was unable/unwilling to function normally and enjoy home comforts, like a bed, not sitting in your own soiled clothes etc.

The main character really irritated me, the lengthy descriptions of everything (5 pages describing a tube journey in all manner of similes and metaphors) were just unnecessary and there really should have been warnings about the horrendously graphically detailed descriptions of bodily functions somewhere in the blurb. I’m glad this was a library book and not one I had purchased.

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Never pick up this book! The extremely visual descriptions of poop and vomit are revolting. At some point the book loses all it's meaning and instead focuses on describing the most digusting scenarios. The main character becomes unbearable and so self-absorbed, aswell as her friend. Sorry but I'm not going to waste my time reading a book about women defecating on the floor

[Professor Weasel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely one of the most insane and twisted books I've ever read. ***NOT for the faint of heart!*** Books this courageous deserve applause. Reads like David Foster Wallace mixed with Marquis de Sade in a blender (in a good way).

[fliss heywood · Rating 1 out of 5]

'the language of disgust had grown ever more creative while the language of adoration had grown stale''

'sometimes we want to hang onto people... and we do that by taking away their choices'

[Hannah Rose]

Put down at ~50%.
Good observations about consumerism and toxic productivity, but too disgusting to enjoy.

[Nicola Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s only so many pages describing literal human shit you can read before the whole point of the book starts to get a bit lost

[Mizzette Ao · Rating 2 out of 5]

Go piss girl

[twoey (rachel q.) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do NOT read this if you have OCD

[Abi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listen, don't read this book if you don't like piss and shit

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is very rare that I do not finish a book, but there are special circumstances where I can make an exception. This book was interesting for the first half, until the main character suddenly became obsessed with the idea of consuming her own feces. The author tried very hard to justify Maya’s actions, but no sane person would be tempted to do that. Additionally, I felt that the writing style did not suit the protagonist’s first person narration. Maya starts out as somewhat relatable and then becomes more and more insufferable the second she returns from her wellness retreat. The introduction of Zelma only made things worse, because she enables Maya’s insanity and is even more obnoxious to listen to than Maya. I tried so hard to finish this book because I was so curious where it could possibly go, but I have gotten to a point where I generally do not care anymore. I would not recommend this to anyone.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disgusting. Disturbing. Glorious. It has something of Burroughs and Ballard about it in using shock to reflect on work, consumerism and homelessness.

[S.P. Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was in my teens, an acquaintance lived in a squat. I don’t remember much apart from the smell and the squat dog, named Crapper, who earned his name by crapping wherever he felt like it. You had to mind your feet in the squat, and it could well have been that Crapper wasn’t solely responsible for the mess.

Reading “Come Join Our Disease” unearthed this distant memory. The story concerns a young woman called Maya, who is put on a philanthropic programme to “humanise homelessness” by a large tech organisation, a “disruptive global player.” Maya is given a flat and a job parsing images, or “wiping shit from the face of the internet”, but starts to rebel against the media/marketing/TED talk obsession with wellness, self-care and improvement, with all the associated journeys, arcs, narratives and outcomes of “becoming” someone.

Maya meets a kindred spirit, a woman called Zelma, and together the two rage against the wellness machine with an “anti-project”. This starts with defacing advertisements and roaming around London in the small hours but develops into a commune in a deserted warehouse as the two are joined by other women as well as rats and flies. Maya and her companions become locked in a cycle (virtuous or viscious? difficult to tell - and does it matter ...) of consumption, excretion, decay, disintegration and reassimilation - a sort of “Re-Tox”. This part of the novel is rather like “The Magic Mountain”, but with piles of crap, and makes for pretty grim reading.

I found the start of the novel brilliant and astute, with its description of the DeTox retreat and the loneliness of modern London. But then it all got too bogged down and trapped in its own effluent. All rather repetitive and ridiculous in places.

I couldn’t quite understand how Maya - well-educated and highly intelligent as portayed by her voice - had become homeless in the first place. Zelma was an interesting character, but again, so much background was missing for her that it made her difficult to empathise with. A few elements of the plot felt shaky: despite her rejection of society and big tech, Maya was completely dependent on her mobile, and the group reliant on food donations via social media fans. It wasn’t really twisting the system and subverting it from within, nor was it a true rejection.

“Come Join Our Disease” is a well-written and insightful novel which raises many questions - does becoming useless liberate you? Do human beings have to accept “living in the great pool of our own collective shit?” I did wonder if the world of big tech is closer than it might seem to Maya’s anti-project now, with the vomiting emoji, or the pile of poop emoji.

But I think I’ll give the stage show a miss.

[Callum Morris-Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

To sum up, the story follows Maya, a homeless woman who, upon having her encampment razed, is offered a job at a tech company as part of a programme of rehabilitation where she must record her ‘journey’ on Instagram. Here, she is charged with cycling through and censoring an endless stream of pictures uploaded online: from child pornography, to acts of coprophagy and beastiality. Becoming increasing jaded with her day-to-day life, and after enduring a sadistic detox retreat, she encounters Zelma, whose anti-wellness activism - defacing the unattainable beauty standards sold by magazines and advertisement - shares an affinity with Maya’s anger at the aestheticization of starvation and discomfort she endured on the streets. In response, they set up a commune where women can come and be free: to resist societal pressures, to reconnect with their most primal bodily needs; to be ugly, to shit, piss, vomit freely, and indeed, exist upon and alongside that very excrement. The blurb tells us that this is “a book about freedom, and how much of it any of us can truly withstand”.

I was debating whether to give this book a 4 or a 3, but I think a 3.5 is perhaps more appropriate. I’ve never read anything like this before: it nauseated me, made me laugh out loud at times, but also lifted the veil on some of the ways I look at the world. Like ‘No One Is Talking About This’, I still can’t quite decide whether I ‘enjoyed’ reading it, but I certainly won’t be able to stop thinking about it for quite some time.

I was prompted to pick it up by a lecture which explored ‘disgust’ in contemporary literature. This novel certainly has that in spades: to disgust, repel and taboo-break is it’s modus operandi, and perhaps it goes too far in that regard. I’m no prude, but by besmearing some of the really thought-provoking, important social commentary on our current sense of ennui, our ecological crisis, and the unimaginability of a society undefined by capitalist realism, I wonder if it is too self-indulgent and self-consuming to get the point across. I get the reason for the ‘commune’ section being as long as it is, so as to give a sense of the weakening weight of the women’s freedom and the friction their feculence ironically ends up causing, but I think this would have been more successful being a hundred or so pages shorter. That being said, I would still recommend this book to those who aren’t squeamish and like being challenged by what they read: it’s certainly not for the faint of heart, but it’s satire, or should I say, ‘shatire’, is corrosive, timely and deserves to be consumed.

[Fiona Walker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Welcome to the Thunderdome, my friend. This book left me simultaneously speechless and overflowing with thoughts. I was completely on board with Maya’s razor-sharp cynicism toward performative social rituals, corporate culture, toxic wellness trends, and all the rest, it landed hard and true.

But then… THEN things take a violent turn. A deliberate assault on your tolerance for the grotesque and macabre. The infamous train scene (bleurghhh) followed by the subsequent purging (double bleurghhh) might be the most shocking moments for any reader. I braced myself, thinking part two would push me past my limits, but weirdly, it didn’t. As Maya’s life descended into shit (..yep 💩) within the commune with the other women, I found myself oddly desensitised.

The relentless descriptions of decay and disease started to feel less like literal horror and more like a deliberate metaphor, an extreme commentary on capitalism’s obsession with productivity, perfection, and control, and the way toxic wellness culture exploits guilt and fear, particularly in women, to sell an unattainable fantasy of the ‘better you’. Suffering is glorified as discipline (boss bitch energy), vulnerability is monetised, and the literal filth becomes a mirror for these societal pressures. I got it, though it landed in a slightly wanky, holier-than-thou way if I’m honest.

By the end, I wasn’t horrified so much as detached from the visceral depictions of the commune, intrigued to see how Byers would wrap it up, but never fully invested. Having just watched The Substance, I found that the condensed, body-horror format of its metaphor worked better for me than the drawn-out filth and decay of the novel. A bit overcooked as a full-length book.

⭐️⭐
Strong concept, sharp critique, but I literally cannot recommend this to anyone I know.

Watch The Substance instead (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) if you like the sound of the novel’s general premise but don’t want to be put off your lunch (or all of your lunches.. forever)

[Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished reading. Took a few days sporadic reading. I didn’t know who Byers was. I was surprised that ‘Sam’ was male. I had (unconscious biases at play) assumed she was perhaps a radical separatist lesbian. Several references to aggressive male piss and the way men were portrayed, plus the ‘all-female’ environment of the central part of the novel pointed that way.
Many reviews seem to simply summarise the tale. Seems pointless to me. Would I recommend this story? Warning would be that if your mental health is precarious, maybe avoid or take in small doses. Like other reviewers, it left a degree of bafflement, though as someone who’s also dabbled in Buddhisms, I began to see the pointers to eastern philosophies. Reading one of Mz Byers own pieces ( https://www.thesocial.com/every-book-...) a lot of light is shed there. In a sense my biggest takeaway is the attempt to reconcile and then ‘fuck reconciling’ since we live in endless paradox…so Maya, our protagonist ends up in a place that is really the only possibility. She has seen and been death, she decides against regular life and suicide and…is she reconciled? Is she ‘redeemed’ as the blurb suggest? Never trust the book summary on the back of the novel- it’s like a free taster of the drug on offer, it cannot be the drug itself. You have to try it yourself. If you are open to a book that made me see into my own ‘madness’ and that of this human-made-madness/beauty/madness/beauty, step on in…

[Isabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was particularly challenging to decide what to write about this book, and what rate it.

I settled on 4 stars, one of the simple reasons being, that if a book leaves me wondering what impression I should be left with, then that is a sign of a good novel.

Admittedly, (and from reading other reviews, I know I'm not the only one) I found the description misleading. Only about 1/3 of the book centres around the initial premise. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it wasn't exactly a disappointment, it just caught me off guard. Any one who has read the novel will understand just how caught off guard you will be.

Byers writes all of his characters in a way that makes you feel like you need a shower. That takes some good writing and craftspersonship. Reviews that take issue with the book not being 'realistic' or 'far-fetched' haven't taken into account the satire that is laid on thick throughout the novel. It's about extremes, and you get just that.

Whilst I didn't 100% understand Mya's motivations for what she does, I don't think we are meant to. Us readers are a representation of the society that abandons, and the structures she abhors. Why would we understand what she is doing? We are part of the problem.