They

By Kay Dick

“A masterwork of English pastoral horror.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
“Creepily prescient . . . Insidiously horrifying!” —Margaret Atwood (via Twitter)
“I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.” —Lauren Groff
“Lush, strange, hypnotic, compulsive.” —Eimear McBride
"Crystalline . . . The signature of an enchantress." —Edna O’Brien
"A masterpiece of creeping dread." —Emily St John Mandel

Kay Dick's radical dystopian masterpiece, lost for forty years—with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.

   Published to some acclaim in 1977 but swiftly forgotten, Kay Dick's They follows a nameless, genderless narrator living along the lush but decimated English coast, where a loose cohort of cultural refugees live meditative, artistic, often polyamorous lives. But this rustic tranquility is punctuated by bursts of menace as they must continually flee a faceless oppressor, an organization known only as “They,” whose supporters range the countryside destroying art and culture and brutalizing those who resist the purge. As the menacing “They” creep ever closer, a loosely connected band of dissidents attempt to evade the chilling mobs, but it’s only a matter of time until their luck runs out.
    An electrifying literary artefact—a lost dystopian masterpiece and overlooked queer classic—They is an uncanny and prescient vision of a world hostile to beauty, emotion, and the individual.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781039002296

Kay Dick

Kay Dick (1915–2001) was the first female director of an English publishing house, promoted to the role at the age of twenty-six and mixing with what she described “a louche set” that included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, and Muriel Spark. From the 1940s through the ’60s, she and her long-term partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, were at the heart of the London literary scene. She published seven novels, a study of the commedia dell’arte, and two volumes of literary interviews.

Reviews for They

[michael5rimmer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Think Fahrenheit 451 crossed with, say, The Wicker Man or The Midwich Cuckoos, add a splash of Orwell and a touch of McGooghan's The Prisoner, and that might get you close to They.The overt brutality used by Them is relatively rare, but extreme when used. The menacing feeling of presence, surveillance and consequences results in a society which brutalises itself, through suspicion of difference and non-conformity. The random violence and sadism perpetrated by children is a chilling indication of the moral perversion caused by intolerance and authoritarianism. Artists are most despised for their personal vision, and are increasingly persecuted and 'disappeared'.The novella takes the form of discrete chapters, a series of vignettes centred on unnamed narrators (who, given certain events, must be more than one person) linked by the slowly developing socio-political setting. Little is explained, but it all feels sadly too comprehensible. The contrast between the idyllic rural settings (cities are mentioned but not entered) and the brooding atmosphere of oppression is marvellously handled.As Machado states in her introduction, there is no political bias in Dick's story, the oppressive force could be of any persuasion, with one hint that, perhaps, there is a religious element to it. Machado cautions that if you see in Them your political or social opposite, you would be wise to turn that critical gaze also upon yourself.