Status Updates From The Vivisectors

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

Autistic people can't lie. They can't play the same games as us. And we punish them for it. We see them as aggressive, or blunt, or shy, or excessively reserved, but the truth is that they are better than us because being a person in our society means mastering the art of lying, or the art of settling for less, and by this I mean that we are taught to expect very little from ourselves.

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

Likewise, nobody could come up with a plot, or a sequence of actions, that might culminate in a decisive end because our way of interacting with our surroundings was too fragmented: it took place in snatches. Narrative had moved somewhere beyond our reach.

[Again, is the narrator breaking the 4th wall and making observations about the novel they are writing? 😉]

I'm not sure that this is a novel. I think it might be a confession.

[The author/narrator breaks the 4th wall?]

Like vivisectors, we analyzed a situation until we had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels.

{At first this one seems completely different from the dystopian apocalyptic world of The Doloriad, but I'm thinking it could be read as a dystopia of academia as it takes place in a nameless decaying university.]

…this omniscient presence would love me…with a cold, unwilling obsession…so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down…I was unable to imagine love without dominion….

getting to read my most anticipated 2026 release early… thank u santa

The most sublime act is to set another before you.
-WILLIAM BLAKE, Proverbs of Hell

Publication date: May 2026