We Are Underlings
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Death is only the beginning.
Zita Chang, Associate Marketing Manager at the Nine Circles, the only theme park devoted to dying, death, and the afterlife, is just another cog in a corporate machine. Determined not to let her grief over her father’s death interfere with work, she takes advantage of an employee perk: asking the Afterlife team to replace Siri with his voice so he can dispense the advice she never wanted while he was alive.
But when the Executive Director dies under mysterious circumstances weeks before the company’s grand opening, Zita and her coworkers are tasked with programming his reanimated body to keep the launch on schedule. As more colleagues turn up dead, Zita must untangle the mystery in this strange, beautiful celebration of life and death, revolt and redemption.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
One of the strangest premises we’ve heard in a while pulled us right into Doretta Lau’s dark, absurdist debut novel. Zita Chang doesn’t feel great about her job in marketing at Nine Circles. After all, the new Hong Kong theme park will be full of lurid displays about historical disasters, tragic accidents, and gruesome murders when it opens. Then the executive director dies suddenly, and Zita is given the unsavory responsibility of helping to reanimate his corpse so they can open the park on time. What unspools from there is part murder mystery, part workplace comedy, and part surreal journey. Zita’s ambivalence about her job and her difficulty confronting the death of her own father make her a perfect main character for this pitch-black story, and we couldn’t get enough of her wry inner monologue. We Are Underlings is disturbing, clever, and full of morbid food for thought.
