We are never told who they are, what they look like, where they come from only that they are everywhere, conquering all in their path, destroying any artistic and cultural artefacts along the way. I suppose it’s a dystopia of sorts, albeit one that owes as much to Shirley Jackson as it does JG Ballard or Ray Bradbury. "Queer, English, a masterpiece.First published back in the late ‘70s, Kay Dick ’s They is a book so thoroughly strange, so uncomfortably disengaged, that I really wasn’t sure what to make of it.
"The dream setting is cleverly handled, with its shifts of scene and time and its underlying air of menace."-Mary Sullivan " Sunday Telegraph" "Strong stuff, beautifully written, to make a man look behind him in fear and dread when walking down a leafy lane."-Philip Howard " The Times" "Kay Dick's mind is a delicate instrument, aware, sensitive, intelligent, alive to every shade of feeling and sensation."-L. "It's incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten."-Sam Knight " New Yorker" " 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." -Vernon Fane " The Sphere" 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?"-Carmen Maria Machado " The Guardian" It evokes Yoko Ogawa's Revenge, or Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men, occupying a space between dystopia and horror. " They is spare, troubling, eerily familiar.
Like all robust allegories, They grants the reader the freedom to imagine any number of vivid referents for the opaque."-Melissa Anderson " Bookforum" "Both a dystopian fable and a stealth memoir. Winner of the 1977 South-East Arts Literature Prize, Kay Dick's They is an uncanny and prescient vision of a world hostile to beauty, emotion, and the individual. 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. Violent gangs roam the country destroying art and culture and brutalizing those who resist the purge. About the Book "Originally published in 1977 by Allen Lane, London"-Title page verso.īook Synopsis A dark, dystopian portrait of artists struggling to resist violent suppression-"queer, English, a masterpiece." (Hilton Als) Set amid the rolling hills and the sandy shingle beaches of coastal Sussex, this disquieting novel depicts an England in which bland conformity is the terrifying order of the day.
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