Persona

""This is the best book I've read in years. Clements walks onto the scene with the skill and confidence of an old master; Persona disgusts its reader past endurance, then breaks their heart before they realize what's happening. It brings together everything from the films of Ingmar Bergman to Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's a churning black spiral of misery, nausea, and anxiety, and woven through it all an infinitely fragile thread of human connection. Clements has written the year's great work of literary horror. This is not something to miss."" --Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt and Cuckoo ""THIS BOOK IS ABOUT YOU! We are all doomed."" --Sybil Lamb, author of I've Got A Time Bomb ""The most stomach-churning, upsetting, thoroughly cursèd queer book of the year."" --Alison Rumfitt, author of Tell Me I'm Worthless and Brainwyrms ""Harrowing and gorgeously written ... Clements's prose is fearless and sharp, diving into gut-churning corners of the human experience and balancing brutal body horror with pitch-black social commentary. The result is an impressive thrill ride."" --Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""All the walls secrete in this place, grime pulsing and sloughing away like so much sunburnt skin. Clements' prose is a fishhook laced cleanly through the thick flesh of the thumb--an old pain made unreal and vivid in the sputtering, intermittent, blue-lit blight of now. This is the good shit."" --Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold ""An astonishing debut, the Bergman allusion in the title is only the first clue as mysteries unfold and refold, entrapping the reader in a shifting, changing labyrinth of dread. I can't imagine I will read a better novel this year, it is just that brilliant. --David Demchuk, author of RED X and co-author of The Butcher's Daughter ""A nightmarishly realistic and immersively terrifying journey, forcing the reader to take a long, hard look at late-stage capitalism, internet obsession, even what it means to be human. A disorienting story that will hold readers in its thrall."" --Booklist ""It feels almost impossible that this is Clements's debut novel, as it is so disorienting and disturbing it seems to have been written by a master."" --Manda Barker, Raven Book Store (Lawrence, KS) ""Like picking scabs off old wounds, Persona is horrifying, addictive and wonderfully satisfying."" --Avalon Fast, Director of Honeycomb ""Chilling, enthralling ... an intelligent, ungovernable spiral-down-the-drain story that stuns until its bitter end."" --Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own Bookstore (Madison, WI) ""Persona begins as an incantation, imbued with a creeping, disorienting dread that draws the reader into its dark waters of delirium, only to drag your head up for air before plunging you deeper into roiling shadows. Eldritch, beautifully personal and (somehow) very funny, Persona presents horrors both earthly and cosmic in a uniquely nerve-shredding way. Aoife Josie Clements' brain is an intoxicatingly terrifying place, and we're all the better for it."" --John Toews, McNally Robinson Booksellers (Winnipeg, MB) ""Haunting, atmospheric and really well paced."" --Erin McLaughlin, Westbank Community Library (Austin, TX)