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The Compound, by Aisling Rawle (Random House). In this delightfully absorbing novel, an isolated house in the middle of a menacing desert landscape serves as the backdrop of a reality-TV competition. There, a cast of attractive young men and women are recorded with hidden cameras as they complete “tasks”—some innocuous, some sadistic—concocted by the show’s producers. They also pursue romances; if, at sunrise, they are not in bed with a member of the opposite sex, they are eliminated. The novel’s narrator, Lily, convinced that the outside world offers her only “drudgery, day after day,” resolves to win. As the show progresses, the book morphs into a potent examination of self-objectification, of the existential tedium of work, and of the disorientation produced by living in a world where what is genuine and what is performance are difficult to disentangle.
Never Flinch, by Stephen King (Scribner). This propulsive novel follows a police detective and a private eye—Holly Gibney, a character who appears in several other King novels—as they search for a killer who has announced that he will slay fourteen people to avenge the death of a man who was murdered in prison after having been framed. The investigators’ hunt occurs at the same time that an outspoken feminist activist discovers she is being pursued by a stalker while on a national book tour, for which she has employed Gibney as a bodyguard. As the stories begin to converge, King’s narrative can sometimes seem too tidy, but his pacing remains unmatched.
Illustration by Ben Hickey
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