These are unsettling times. And in unsettling times we often look to fiction to cast a wider perspective and help us see past our day-to-day struggles to the larger context. This was the idea behind Disorder — to use the tropes of the thriller to cast some of our current daily horrors into new relief. The writers we approached were not typical thriller writers; instead we went to some of today's most interesting literary writers and asked them to try their hands at works of suspense that arose out of their own civic fears. Luckily, they were game.
Real-world horrors and ghoulish fictions mix to startling effect in these six works of social suspense meant to entertain, unsettle, and pique in equal measure. If newspaper headlines sat around telling scary stories around the campfire, this is what they would sound like.
Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, uses a deceptively simple story to lay bare the logical conclusion of a society that values its sons over its daughters in "The Best Girls."
The author of Beasts of No Nation, Uzo Iweala, takes us deep inside the mind of a man losing hold on his sense of self after a case of mistaken identity sends him on a Kafkaesque journey through the underworld of the US immigration system in "Anonymous."
In “Loam”, Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin, brings us a chilling tale in which the monstrous effects of pedophilia and ghostly revenge are amplified by small town narrow-mindedness.
Lauren Beukes’ “Ungirls” explores the world of Incels in a twisted, terrifying, and ultimately empowering story that could only have come from the writer behind such bestselling books as Motherland.
In “The Beckoning Fair One”, bestselling author of ll Will, Dan Chaon, weaves a coming-of-age story that will keep you up nights wondering whether everything feels just a little too familiar.
And finally, in “Will Williams” Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift, takes an Edgar Allen Poe classic about döppelgangers and moral degradation and reshapes it into a scathing portrait of the schools-to-prison pipeline that treats young black men as fungible — often by turning them against each other.
The entire collection is available as a one-click free download for Amazon Prime members. We are honored that this was the Amazon Original Stories collection selected to launch on Prime Day.