Another season of Severance has come to an end, and hopefully we don’t have to wait as long as we did for new episodes as last time, but alas! We could be without Severance for a very long time! I’m crying into a melon bar over it! But since I love any opportunity to write a hyperspecific book list, I thought I’d pull together a Severance-themed one. The queer novels featured on this list are all quite different, but they all contend with the violence and destruction of capitalism in some way. Many also feature grief and therefore remind me of this season’s standout episode, “Chikhai Bardo.” Go read these queer books about grief, capitalism, and the horrors of having a job!
We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets
Of all the books on this list, this one is the most similar to Severance in my mind. It’s a novella about Kayleigh, a woman who takes a job at a social media company she’s not allowed to name doing content moderation. All day she has to watch horrific things online and decide if they go against the platform’s ever-shifting rules. She starts dating a woman who works with her and becomes friends with other coworkers, but the fucked-up work they all have to do starts seeping into their personal lives and senses of self. You’ll find a lot of thematic and tonal overlap with Severance here, and I think it’s one of the most underrated lesbian books to come out in the past few years.
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Protagonist Sneha lands a corporate job working for a man who dictates everything she should do down to what she wears. The novel is very much about the ways we’re forced to contort to fit within the grueling confines of capitalism. It’s also, as its title suggests, about imagining alternative possibilities and worlds, rooted in collectivism and chosen family. Here’s some of what I wrote about it in my review: “A masterclass in character development, All This Could Be Different provides a textured view of friendship. It looks at not just how we show up for and tend to the people we care about but also how we fail them.”
The Very Nice Box by Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett
A funny but also biting send-up of corporate culture, The Very Nice Box follows Ava Simon, who designs storage boxes for Brooklyn-based furniture company, STÄDA. She immerses herself in the work, still recovering from the tragic death of her girlfriend. She embarks on a complicated romance with her new boss, Mat Putnam. Burying yourself in your corporate job because you can’t bear thinking of your dead girlfriend? Yes, the Severance vibes are strong with this one.
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
Memory Piece moves from the 1980s to the dot com boom of the 1990s to a speculative dystopian imagining of the 2040s, following three intertwined but distinct characters: Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng. The novel is about art and activism and capitalism and tech and the interplay of all these things. As I wrote in my review: “Memory Piece is queer not only in content but in form, its playful approach to craft not quite experimental but nonetheless subtly imaginative and nonconforming.”
Dead in Long Beach California by Venita Blackburn
When Coral finds her brother Jay’s body after he kills himself, all that’s left behind is his bachelor pad in Long Beach, California and a cell phone, which Coral starts using to text people pretending to be her dead brother. Soon, this macabre game of pretend spirals out of control and Coral’s grasp on reality loosens. The novel is about the strange — and sometimes incidentally humorous — ways we move through grief.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Also a grief novel, Our Wives Under the Sea alternates between the perspectives of wives Leah and Miri after Leah comes back wrong following being lost in the deep sea when her submarine mission for the mysterious company she works for as a marine biologist goes awry. Mystery swirls around Leah’s work and the company that employs her, and Miri is desperate to find answers but the company proves evasive in a very Lumon way.
The Default World by Naomi Kanakia
This novel is about trans woman Jhanvi who left San Francisco, got sober, and started working at a co-op so she could save for surgeries. But her friend and paramour Henry pulls her back into the hedonistic tech underground of San Francisco with the allure of his group of rich techie friends who have transformed a warehouse basement into an elaborate sex dungeon for raucous parties. Jhanvi wonders if she can scam the group and also marry Henry for his fancy healthcare. The novel offers a send-up of “privileged leftist millennial tech culture” and mixes humor into its critiques.
I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself by Mac Crane
Following a queer mother grieving the loss of her wife and raising a child in a speculative version of the United States where surveillance culture has become even more violent and oppressive, I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself is a strange and evocative debut that’ll gently haunt you.
Exactly what I needed – thank you for this list!