I’ve worked in a wide range of jobs in a wide range of buildings: pubs, malls, posh houses, offices, small individual stores. My CV is frankly, bizarre. It is only really looking back on my time clocking in shifts in the vast, open plan offices or the seemingly endless, run down malls that I can realistically call those moments of my professional life gothic. At the time, I wasn’t looking for ghosts or monsters, nor becoming either of those things. I was getting on with it, taking home the terrible pay, dreaming of some other life, inching my way towards it. Placing a new face over mine, and asking customers if I can get them anything else with that.
In the great tradition of gothic literature, the place in which the drama unfolds becomes a metaphor in itself—this we know, the haunted house chief amongst them. When I was writing Eat The Ones You Love, I gave a lot of time to looking back at my time working in suburban shopping centers. How much growing up I did in them, even if it felt like they were keeping me frozen in time. The novel is set in an amalgam of the long, weird halls I once worked in: the books loves these places like I love them, but treats them as what I now truly believe they are: terrifying.
These shopping centers weren’t exactly thriving back then, but now, in the long and strange shadow of the internet, they are not only dying, but they are heaving their final breaths. They are not haunted by a heart thumping under the floorboards, or the oppressive secrets of a complicated family, or the beloved, deceased, and utterly irreplaceable wife of the man of the house, but the mall as it is today is more Manderlay than may at first meet the eye. It is instead haunted by the day-to-day of the waning collective. By an ordinary past that is no longer necessary. By dust-filled deadstock shops. By weird vape emporiums. By shuttered concessions, empty fountains. I noticed recently, in a shopping centre where my mother would drop me off at the in-house crèche while she ran errands, that the space that had once been a vibrant children’s play centre was now, inexplicably, an oratory. If that isn’t gothic, I do not know what is.
My time in offices was short lived: I made a good receptionist, but a very, very bad and easily distracted copywriter. I had no idea how to behave in these spaces—offices are governed by invisible, strict social rules that I lacked the maturity and frankly, basic people skills to understand. Stephen King notes in On Writing that the origin of the word ‘haunting’ comes from ‘haunt’—a place where animals go to feed. There is no feeding like that which we see in offices—most specifically in the tech space. The feed is on scraps of power, of status. There is aggressive performance at every turn. There is such pure want in the air. Here is where we find ghosts. Here is where we find monsters.
I never knew how to manage it. I remember so clearly a Sunday before going in to one contract job I acquired during my time living in San Francisco—a content writing job at a start-up—I sat at a party looking at the clock, realizing there were only twelve hours before I had to be back at my desk, and it felt as though my blood was turning to concrete. Here, again, a kind of horror. At what, I still don’t know. The feel of the place, more than anything. But still. I showed up until my contract ran out. I went to work every day, even as it ate me, as we all do. And it is this forced commitment, this sense of being trapped, that I think makes the workplace the perfect site for exploring and unfolding the gothic. If we tilt the way we read books about work ever so slightly, they can become horror in our hands.
In the way that Dark Academia romanticizes and escalates and enriches the relative mundanity of the world of education, I posit that there is a whole hidden genre of books about work that already lean firmly to the side of the gothic.
Severance by Ling Ma
There is no denying the almost prophetic nature of element of some of Ling Ma’s 2018 dystopian parable, but where the gothic employment energy hits is truly the fact of our protagonist finding sustainable employment (in the Bible department of a publishing company) while the world succumbs to a devastating virus. Worse, how good remaining open in a crisis looks for the company’s image—and worse again, how one can show up to work even when there is nobody left to work for.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
This, to me, is a tender and elegant novel about being at odds with the world, but also, with a tilt, the convenience store could read as a strange prison. These identical spaces, these machines for life, this realm where Keiko, our utterly singular protagonist, can function well—though the rest of the world is difficult. Without the convenience store, Keiko cannot cope. She returns, as though drawn by something unspeakable. Is this not a kind of a ghost story? A story of possession? There is no specter or ghoul at its heart, just the inescapable halogen glow of the conbini.
Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
Published in 1995, there is something of the dark oracle about Microserfs. A group of tech employees work for a software giant, and live in a house together before absconding to work on a new project in Silicon Valley. One character eats only two dimensional foods and is addicted to cough syrup. Another has an eating disorder, another is plagued by problems with his skin, others are addicted to exercise. The treatment of the body is so confronting here, in contrast with the early look at what would become the most powerful sector in the world, and the damning, all-consuming expectations of the staff that make the machines work. At the time, Microserfs was satire. Now, it reads like a warning.
Promising Young Women by Caroline O’Donoghue
What begins as a sharp, funny story about a sometime anonymous online agony aunt who throws herself into an affair with her boss, at some point, takes the reader by total surprise and turns from office drama into something much darker. Jane, who is almost without reservation shagging her older boss, begins to quite literally decay. She slowly loses touch with reality as his manipulation escalates, and her lies become harder to maintain. Once the trapdoor of this novel opens, we are no longer just in a flashy London office or in clandestine hotel rooms, and instead somewhere much stranger, and somewhere much worse.
Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, translated by Hester Velmans
Love can be the salve of all terrible jobs, surely. Love is what buoys is through the worst seasons of our employment. In Hard Copy, though, the love is taboo—our protagonist’s paramour is a photocopier. The tight, earnest prose brings the reader right onto her side, even if her tastes are a little unconventional. Is it not gothic to have one’s heart trapped by something that can never really offer you a future, instead, only a life of shame and secrecy? Is it not a horror to love a machine?
Candy House by Jennifer Egan
I do feel there should be a sub-category within the Gothic Employment that handles tech, specifically, because there is a growing darkness to every novel written about tech as each year passes. Egan’s novel is a set of beautifully interlinking short stories—and a sequel to A Visit From The Goon Squad—many of which orbit a company called Mandela, which externalizes memories. Lives. Characters upload themselves, or wrestle with the nature of what it is to do so. They willingly make ghosts of themselves, permanent digital monuments. This is a vast digital graveyard in the making—and the consequences of that are complicated, and heavy, as are all dealings with life after death.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The workplace here is no office, no shopfront, no sprawling tech campus. Instead it is an unknowable and labyrinthine House, to which our protagonist, Piranesi, is in endless service to. His employment is the study of the tides, the gradual cataloguing and exploration of the House. His boss? Well, his captor, The Other, visits him from time to time. I think about this book every day, in my own work, my own obsession with my job. Piranesi is peak Gothic Employment: but unlike the other titles in this list, it is first gothic, employment second. This is a novel about a kind if psychic indentured servitude, about dedication to the place in which one ‘works’ at all cost. About how easy it is to become lost.
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