From the Publisher
A creepily prescient tale in which anonymous mobs target artists and destroy their art for the crime of individual vision. Insidiously horrifying!”
—Margaret Atwood
“The fourth book by the trailblazing queer English writer, editor and publisher Kay Dick . . . spare, troubling, eerily familiar. It evokes Yōko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales or Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, occupying a space between dystopia and horror." —Carmen Maria Machado, The Guardian
“Queer, English, a masterpiece.” —Hilton Als
“They is dark, but the light never quite goes out . . . The book is supple with dread . . . And a great part of the rediscovery is the figure of Dick herself: a fully formed narrator, bowed and unbowed, monocle intact, who has weathered the storm already.” —Sam Knight, The New Yorker
“Both a dystopian fable and a stealth memoir . . . Like all robust allegories, They grants the reader the freedom to imagine any number of vivid referents for the opaque." —Melissa Anderson, Bookforum
“Dick’s lush, transcendent nature writing contrasts with her spare, elliptical dialogue . . . [it’s] a cri de coeur against urbanization . . . They is a study of fear. Its disconcerting power lies in its dream logic and elisions—the unexplained background, the offstage violence.” —Madeleine Feeny, The Spectator
“[A] stunningly effective dystopian nightmare . . . Could there be a more fitting moment for the revival of Dick’s uneasy little masterpiece than our own era of isolation, fractious culture wars, widening intolerance, and environmental decline?” –David Wright, Library Journal, Starred Review
“A tension of glinting malice pervades the narrator's episodic travels . . . here is a liberatory current of queer and nonmonogamous love and desire running counter to the increasingly stifling oppression enacted on the populace . . . Dick’s dreamlike rendering of virulent conformity and a quotidian bloodthirsty anti-intellectualism still resonate. A timely reissue of English author Dick's slim dystopian fever dream.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[A] disquieting, lean, pared-back dystopian tale . . . One element that makes the book especially disturbing is that “they,” whoever they are, are not a government-sanctioned group like Bradbury’s firemen or Orwell’s all-pervading government surveillance, but rather an unsanctioned multitude, the strength of which appears to lie not in official mandates, but rather in the swell of their ever-increasing numbers . . . It’s chilling, but compellingly so.” —Lucy Scholes, The Paris Review
“Eerie, atmospheric . . . The faceless nature of the antagonists—whose philosophy, goals, and power structures are unspoken—runs counter to other mid-century dystopian tales and leaves space for interpretation . . . Dick creates a pervasive sense of dread for those who give their lives to art. This unsettling dreamlike endeavor is a worthy rediscovery.” —Publishers Weekly
Hilton Als
Queer, English, a masterpiece.
Bookforum - Melissa Anderson
"Both a dystopian fable and a stealth memoir . . . Like all robust allegories, They grants the reader the freedom to imagine any number of vivid referents for the opaque."
The Guardian - Carmen Maria Machado
"They is spare, troubling, eerily familiar. It evokes Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge, or Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, occupying a space between dystopia and horror. The lush landscapes are haunted by profoundly unsettling details about the forces at work—'It was no good listening for footsteps,' the narrator tells us, 'they wore no shoes'—and all of it a backdrop for endless questions about art: What does it mean to create for no audience?"
The Spectator - Madeleine Feeny
Dick’s lush, transcendent nature writing contrasts with her spare, elliptical dialogue . . . [it’s] a cri de coeur against urbanization . . . They is a study of fear. Its disconcerting power lies in its dream logic and elisions—the unexplained background, the offstage violence.
Paris Review - Lucy Scholes
[A] disquieting, lean, pared-back dystopian tale . . . One element that makes the book especially disturbing is that “they,” whoever they are, are not a government-sanctioned group like Bradbury’s firemen or Orwell’s all-pervading government surveillance, but rather an unsanctioned multitude, the strength of which appears to lie not in official mandates, but rather in the swell of their ever-increasing numbers . . . It’s chilling, but compellingly so.
New Yorker - Sam Knight
It’s incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten.
Margaret Atwood
A creepily prescient tale in which anonymous mobs target artists and destroy their art for the crime of individual vision. Insidiously horrifying!
The Times - Philip Howard
Strong stuff, beautifully written, to make a man look behind him in fear and dread when walking down a leafy lane.
The Sphere - Vernon Fane
"[Kay Dick] is a writer who who respects human beings even in their pettiness or confusion; who regards each of them as a worthy object of study and even tenderness, and who devotes as much space and care to the description of what one might call a thoroughly trivial person as to a creature of heroic design.”
Sunday Times - L. P. Hartley
Kay Dick’s mind is a delicate instrument, aware, sensitive, intelligent, alive to every shade of feeling and sensation.
Sunday Telegraph - Mary Sullivan
The dream setting [of They] is cleverly handled, with its shifts of scene and time and its underlying air of menace.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-01-26
Told in interconnected vignettes, this novella (originally published in 1977) follows an unnamed narrator who apprehensively treads an uneasy coexistence with a murky, decentralized movement known only as "they."
Falling somewhere between a haunting and a populist coup, "they" sweep through England, steadily growing their numbers and targeting artists and intellectuals, in particular, as well as those living alone or apart from partners or in otherwise nontraditional arrangements. Emotional expression is likewise discouraged through violence and through containment at reeducation programs in windowless towers that begin to proliferate like mushrooms after a storm. A tension of glinting malice pervades the narrator's episodic travels through seashore, town, and countryside, the dread of uncertainty tainting the safety of collective gatherings with friends and highlighting the dangers that lurk in simply conducting one's work and life in the world. They melt into shadows and steal into homes, unseen but often detected almost as a disturbance in the atmosphere, destroying books, music, paintings, any and all fruits of creative pursuit. Those who resist are made an example of; they mete out biblical-style punishments—blinding painters, amputating or maiming writers' hands—up to and including execution. They commit random violence against people going about their lives and drive others to madness, self-harm, and suicide in reaction to the strictures placed upon them by this new order, as when the narrator intentionally sprains their ankle to gain a temporary medical dispensation to express pain, allowing them to indulge in "the luxury of going utterly to pieces for forty-eight hours." Although the narrator's gender is never made explicit, there is a liberatory current of queer and nonmonogamous love and desire running counter to the increasingly stifling oppression enacted on the populace. (Dick was herself bisexual and, as noted in Lucy Scholes' afterword to this edition, once declared in a Guardian interview, "Gender is of no bloody account.") The implication that only professional artists appear to be resistant to "their" coercion and brainwashing tactics or that the only creators of note are professionals may rankle, but Dick's dreamlike rendering of virulent conformity and a quotidian bloodthirsty anti-intellectualism still resonate.
A timely reissue of English author Dick's slim dystopian fever dream.
