Vulture Magazine Best Books of 2022
Sunday Times Best Science-Fiction Books of 2022
“Distinctive, stylish and maddening... [The Doloriad] just might be what your rotten little heart deserves.” —The New York Times
“A brilliant, unsettling, gothic take on a Greek tragedy.” —i-D
“Gothic, strange, provocative, but also incredibly moving and absolutely unforgettable.” —Cosmopolitan
“Williams compiles her images in breathless, smothering drifts that mimic both the oppressive landscape and the gauzy unreliability of the main characters’ perceptions with virtuosic intensity.” —Kirkus
“Bizarre and strangely beautiful... Williams’s lyrical, visceral prose brilliantly sustains her nightmarish vision... bold and demented.” —Publishers Weekly
"An apocalypse narrative of biblical proportions... Williams’s novel boldly engages philosophical and theological questions about humanity’s will to live and right to survive and offers a shimmering glimpse of a world beyond our own." —BookForum
"The Doloriad is strange, dark and unapologetic... It’s a formally daring novel... The imagery is shocking, the language epic. In her memorable debut, Williams risks it all." —Five Dials, Best Debuts of 2022
"A wild and wholly original contribution to the growing genre of climate fiction... Like certain ancient texts, The Doloriad seeks to capture the universals of human experience, our essence and our drives." —Literary Review
"Williams is an intelligent stylist, deftly unfolding energetic prose reliant on her powerfully strange imagery... By the end of The Doloriad, I was left not so much with the feeling of exhaustion you might expect from such a heavy work, but with one of awe." —The White Review
"A striking dystopian debut... The tension between old and new ways of being unfolds like a kind of gothic Greek tragedy. The prose brilliantly suggests its world, full of sucking mud and tumbledown ruins: it is repellent but also sumptuous, shifting thickly through its main characters' perspectives to create a dreamlike yet materially vivid world." —The Sunday Times
In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a ruined city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over. Her children and the children they have with one another aren't so sure. Surrounded by the silent forest and the dead suburbs, they feel closer to the ruined world than to their parents. Nevertheless, they scavenge supplies, collect fuel, plant seeds, and attempt to cultivate the poisoned earth, brutalizing and caring for one another in equal measure. For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes of a TV show called Get Aquinas in Here, in which a problem-solving medieval saint faces down a sequence of logical and ethical dilemmas. But one day the Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors, and sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering. When Dolores returns a few days later, her reappearance triggers the breakdown of Matriarch's fragile order and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken. As the children seize their chance to escape, the world of the television saint Aquinas and that of the family begin to melt together with terrible consequences. Told in extraordinary, intricate prose that moves with a life of its own, at times striking with the power of physical force, Missouri Williams's debut novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. Gothic and strange, moving and disquieting, and often hilarious, The Doloriad stares down, with narrowed eyes, humanity's unbreakable commitment to life.