“A masterwork of English pastoral horror.” —Claire-Louise Bennett
“Creepily prescient . . . Insidiously horrifying!” —Margaret Atwood (via Twitter)
“I'm pretty wild about this paranoid, terrifying 1977 masterpiece.” —Lauren Groff
“Lush, strange, hypnotic, compulsive.” —Eimear McBride
"Crystalline . . . The signature of an enchantress." —Edna O’Brien
"A masterpiece of creeping dread." —Emily St John Mandel

The radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years, with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.

Published to some acclaim in 1977 but swiftly forgotten, Kay Dick's They follows a nameless, genderless narrator living along the lush but decimated English coast, where a loose cohort of cultural refugees live meditative, artistic, often polyamorous lives. But this rustic tranquility is punctuated by bursts of menace as they must continually flee a faceless oppressor, an organization known only as “They,” whose supporters range the countryside in a grisly mob of mostly mute, quasi-automatons. Moving in slow but deliberate concentric circles, “They” root out free-thinking subversives: the surviving artists, craftspeople, intellectuals, even the unmarried and the childless. As Dick unveils in ominous fragments, “They” are not affiliated with a dystopic totalitarian state, “They” are an unsanctioned multitude, the strength of which appears to lie not in official mandates, but rather in the swell of their ever-increasing numbers.
An electrifying literary artefact—a lost dystopian masterpiece and overlooked queer classic—They returns to print in this special international publication brimming with contemporary resonance.