AT WILL

There is no HR. There is no org chart. There is no one to complain to. That is not an accident - it is the architecture.

Theo Marsh is twenty-four and has just been hired by Blume, the legendary independent advertising agency whose campaigns everyone half-remembers. On his first day nobody gives him a contract to sign. When he asks about HR he is told, warmly, that there isn't any. His security badge carries a photograph of himself that he has never had taken.

Then the instructions begin to contradict each other. Do it. Undo it. Nobody asked you for that. Nobody says warm here. When Theo finally takes his notebook of nine timestamped contradictions into a meeting, three men arrive to be kind to him, and he learns that the manager who has been briefing him is not a person at all but a desk that three men rotate through - so that no one ever lies, and the lie lives in the gaps between them.

Then the phone starts ringing after midnight.

In a half-empty cafeteria at twenty to three he finds a frightened, sharp-eyed woman who leaves the room rather than speak to him. Her name is Wren Adler, she has survived four years at Blume, and she will only talk to him outside the building. She tells him there are no rules. She tells him it escalates - that it goes to write-ups and improvement plans and firings and recalls, and that some people do not come out the other side, and that nobody comes to help. Paper doesn't work in there, she says, and offers no explanation at all.

It takes her much longer to tell him what the senior partners are.

AT WILL is a slow-burn literary cosmic horror novel about corporate gaslighting: about being managed by an institution engineered so that nothing which happens to you can ever be an event. About the documents we keep to prove we were here. About discovering that the cruelty is not a culture problem, that the courtly grandfatherly man at the top of a company founded in 1919 has never once been a man, and that the thing which feeds on your doubt has been very patient and is not remotely finished.

And about the only thing that starves it: two people who will stand in the same room and swear to the same truth.

For readers of Thomas Ligotti's My Work Is Not Yet Done, Charles Burns, Severance, and anyone who has ever gone home and written down exactly what was said, and when, because they knew they would be told it never happened.

Contains 18 full-page illustrations.