“I look over to Silas in the passenger seat, still bouncing, and see in his eyes this deep, unhinged longong for something he can’t begin to understand. I feel like I understand him, just trying to push things further and further to try to hit the point where it all breaks, your mind cracks open, and you find some permanent truth, some keen emotional awareness that doesn’t leave when you come down. I get that longing for God, too.”

Is it too early to be putting books down as potential books of the year? Because Persona by Aoife Josie Clements is an incredible, vital and original literary horror novel, and if I read much else on a par with it this year we’ll be in a golden age of fiction. Clements’ debut novel is a masterful work that merges elements of body horror and corporate horror to create a vital and uncomfortable exploration of our current state of fractured identity. Persona is a harrowing and unflinching exploration of how late-period capitalism and the internet conspire to dehumanize us all, but especially trans people. It’s brilliant, incisive and utterly terrifying, and immediately catapults Clements up there with Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin as a trans woman who is reinventing horror for the modern age. I think I’m gonna start calling them the Unholy Trinity.

Annie is a trans woman who lives as a feral shut-in, until one day she discovers porn of herself on the internet that she has no memory of making. Amy is a trans woman who spends her time partying with her friends who she can’t really connect with and seeking the oblivion of drink and drugs. Both of them are haunted by a sense that a piece of themselves is missing, and by disturbing memories of shadowy creatures in the night. Eventually their investigations lead them to each other. Not only are they identical, it turns out they are both working for the same mysterious organization, Chariot Marketing Solutions. Annie and Amy plan to run away together, thinking that they might complete the hole in each other’s lives, but on their way out of town they discover Chariot’s secret offices. Will Chariot contain the secret to their doubled identities, and if it does will they ever be able to escape from it?

Persona powerfully explores our modern alienation. At the heart of the novel is the question, if our very identities can become fetishized commodities, do we retain a self outside of capitalism and the internet of things? To explore this, Clements has created a labyrinth of a novel, a shifting mirror maze in which nothing and no one is what they seem, and the self is all but unknowable. Is Annie a copy of Amy or vice versa, or are they both copies of something else? The novel cruelly torments both the characters and the reader, offering up no answers but a series of increasingly disturbing images and implications. Annie and Amy both remember a past, a troubled childhood, but a visit to the street where they both believe they grew up reveals only another gap, an absence where there should be substance. Similarly, through Annie’s refusal to leave her disgusting flat and Amy’s propensity for getting out of her head, both women share a strong desire to opt out of consensus reality. But they still both need to make enough money to cover the rent and living expenses – capitalism demands that we engages with it to survive, however obliquely. Chariot doesn’t care how alienating the labour it exploits is; it’s perfectly happy to use the internet to parasitise off the identities of its workers through invasive body scans and to maintain control via impenetrable legalese. Persona engages with both body horror and cosmic horror in striking and inventive ways, but underneath it all is the horror of capitalism, a system that feeds off an interchangeable and disposable working class. 

Clements’ writing is bold and ambitious. Persona is a novel that gleefully experiments with form, engaging with multiple perspectives and approaches over its four interlocking sections. Both Annie’s and Amy’s perspectives, for different reasons, blur the line between reality and nightmare, with sections that dissolve into hallucinogenic dream sequences. Drugs, alienation and obsession colour their views on the world, making it hard to trust what we see through their eyes. Yet the intensity of Clements’ grotesque visions are impossible to dismiss as mere fantasy. There are moments of surreal splendour, in which the line between eroticism and revulsion is completely obliterated. The final section, in which Amy and Annie infiltrate Chariot’s headquarters, takes the novel into New Weird territory. The harrowing finale would do Jeff VanderMeer proud. Ultimately, while its tactical deployment of terror and gore might place it firmly in the horror genre, this is a novel that cares little for genre distinctions, setting up reader expectations only to demolish them with the next page.

Clements’ prose throughout is remarkable. She writes scenes of intense transgressive horror, but she is also clearly a master of both character and atmosphere. Persona positively reeks of dread, the desperation of a shut-in’s room, the hollowness of a bad party once the drugs have run out. The only way to read it is to surrender yourself to the author’s consuming vision, which can mean difficulty digging yourself out of all that paranoia and self-hatred afterwards. Amy and Annie are both curious characters, their fractured identity and sense of self under siege intentionally alienating them from the reader, yet you can’t help but get caught up in their desperate search to find the missing meaning in their lives. The novel’s many side characters leave strong impressions despite frequently appearing in very few pages, Clements showing an admirable ability to convincingly sketch recognizable people in a handful of words and gestures. The novel’s ending is as disorienting and upsetting as it is because as a reader, you do truly become invested in Amy and Annie’s struggles. 

Persona is a stunningly original novel from a powerful new talent. It confirms my long-held belief that horror is where much of the most timely and striking fiction is currently being written, and establishes Clements as a writer starting out her career with an instant classic. It’s profound and insightful in the way only great literature can be, and it’s stomach-churningly horrific and strangely alluring as only the best horror is. I await new writing from Clements with great interest.

Persona is due for publication on 27th January – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org