“I suggest that Penguin make efforts to sell more copies of They to cover this deficit,” Dick suggested in her peevish reply. They sold badly enough that when Dick requested the paperback edition, her editor gently reminded her that authors had to pay for their own copies of their book unless their advance had been earned out. The lush landscapes are haunted by profoundly unsettling details about the forces at work – “It was no good listening for footsteps,” the narrator tells us, “they wore no shoes” – and all of it a backdrop for endless questions about art: What does it mean to create for no audience? If you cannot read a novel any longer, is it enough to remember it? Is it more important to protect the artist or their work?Ĭarmen Maria Machado. It evokes Yōko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales or Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, occupying a space between dystopia and horror. They is spare, troubling, eerily familiar. ‘You’ve forgotten this,’ he had said as he hurled his recently finished fugue into the fire.”) They hold the right arm of Jane, a poet, over flames for eight minutes, for the crime of moving towards her burning work. Should they choose to continue their practice, “they amputate your hands and cut out your tongue”, one of them tells the narrator. A children’s author walks shell-shocked, daily, into a pond, seemingly to extinguish the memory of being set on fire. A sculptor has the broken glass from his sculpture pressed into his eyes. Unrepentant visual artists are blinded, shameless musicians made deaf. They loathe art, people who live alone, excessive displays of emotion they pilfer novels and paintings, they burn music scores and poetry. Calculating in their cruelty and methods in one moment and shockingly reckless and barbaric the next, they move on trawlers in the waterways and erect eerie towers on the coast where the defiant are sent to have their memories purged. Lost for over forty years, Kay Dick's They (1977) is a rediscovered dystopian masterpiece of art under attack: a cry from the soul against censorship, a radical celebration of non-conformity - and a warning.They have no government, no creed, no mercy. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity.

Soon the National Gallery is purged eerie towers survey the coast savage mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist.

THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. 'As creepy, tense and strange as when I first read it 40 years ago.' Ian Rankin

'A masterpiece of creeping dread.' Emily St. As heard on BBC Radio 4's Front Row: the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years: in a nightmarish Britain, THEY are coming closer.

They by Kay Dick