This book made my skin crawl, but I couldn’t put it down. Persona is an unsettling, at times horrifying, novel that explores identity, isolation, exploitation and human connection under the warping influences of the internet and an economic system that leaves many people struggling just to get by. It reads like a nightmare, with prose that is surreal and disorienting at times, and uncomfortably descriptive at others. It would be hard to get into much of an overview without spoiling some key elements of the story, so I’ll just leave you with a bit of the blurb: “A trans woman discovers pornography of herself she has no memory of making, only to find herself led to an unimaginably deeper evil.”
Persona plays out in four parts, getting progressively stranger and stranger as it all unfolds. This one’s a must-read, especially if you’re looking for queer horror. But you might want to line up something light for after.
