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This selection of readings has a common theme: major characters who have been brainwashed into acting against their own interests, remade into something else, something useful to a manipulative other. It seems apropos, given that this is life as we collectively live it. In these books, though, the brainwashing and the manipulation are intensely interpersonal rather than the apparatuses of mass social indoctrination. In Cassandra Khaw’s The All-Consuming World, this is a transformation is engineered and sustained with chemistry and conditioning, which is to say, love in everything but love. Maya may be a pit of bottomless rage and violence but she’s in love with two people at once—the one who pushes her buttons and the one she thinks she doesn’t deserve—and helpless before either of them. This is a book of jagged edges, with an off-kilter style. It’s a heist, but it ends before a heist would. It’s a last stand but it ends at the threshold of climactic violence. And it’s a love triangle that gets resolved as part of someone else’s plot, which seems unsatisfying at first, but it also feels like a fittingly unceremonious end for a master manipulator, to be simply shunted aside by a more effective one playing for bigger stakes.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi lives in a quiet, almost-deserted, perhaps-endless house with a sea in it. A journalist is gaslit to the point of total amnesia by his target, and transformed into a native informant of a world uninhabitable by anyone who wants to keep their self intact. The mystery gets a little too filled in, perhaps, by the neatness of the ending; this is one book where I wanted the mysteries of world and identity to remain unresolved. As we return to the mundane, the dreamlike beauty of the unending house fades, but there is a last-minute return of the otherworldly, too, as if it were a horror film trading in just a slightly different flavour of dread, where we see that there are not two worlds, but only one. Like Piranesi, we too are creatures of forgetting, or worse, never knowing about the world’s other face, the one which sees us as we are.

Both of those are violent remoldings of the self, but in All The Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones it’s even more primal than perverted desire or the dreadful secrets of being, which is to say, this is a book about monstrous parenting. Not only is Amos stolen as a child by a serial killer and brought up to be one, but he is renamed and reraced to better fit into his terrible parent’s vision. The near-complete erasure of who he once was is more total than that of even Piranesi, who at least gets to come back. Piranesi becomes innocent through his remaking, by scraping away most of his self and learning empathy by taking care of the long dead. Amos’s rebellion, ultimately, happens in the same way, in his need to rescue and return his father-kidnapper’s long-dead child victims. He can’t help but see them as alive, even as he hauls their corpses through the narrative, because that would mean it was still not too late. Of course, it is.