I was drinking coffee and reading The Organization is Here to Support You. It was the morning, which meant my patience for bullshit was still relatively high. I had been reading it since the night before—tearing through it, really—and had just gotten to page 87 where the book’s most loathsome character, Devin Brault, made a request of the book’s protagonist, Clarissa, which was so disgusting, I found myself involuntarily gagging. Not just gagging on the inside, either, but the open-mouth, I-might-actually-vomit kind of gagging.

As a longtime lover of horror films, I’m used to watching things that terrify me. That make me sick. But I’ve always avoided the really gory body horror stuff until recently. In fact, the last time I even remember reading horror proper was as a kid obsessed with Goosebumps, a glorious franchise my mother made me give up because it wasn’t good for my nightmare condition, and me waking up screaming in the middle of the night wasn’t good for her. 

December of 2024, that changed. I was walking through Powell’s Books in Portland, OR with my partner, Kevin, one day and the cover of Violent Faculties jumped out at me from the shelf. I didn’t know who Charlene Elsby was at the time, but the cover illustration of a person’s tongue being cut in half by what looked like Gingher fabric scissors, gripped me. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started reading it and, at certain points, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish. Just ask Kevin. Multiple times, I put the book down and said, sometimes with tears in my eyes, “I don’t think I can finish it.” But I did finish it. And I’m so glad I did because that book literally haunts me. I find myself returning to it over and over again, pulling out little bits to use in this paper or that about the subjugation and destruction of the female body by the patriarchy under capitalism. 

I was sitting in my corner chair and Kevin was lying on the sofa nearby when the gagging happened. Sensing the disgust on my face, he looked over. “Damn,” he said, “the only other time I’ve seen you do that was when you were reading Charlene’s other book.” Kevin was, of course, referring to Violent Faculties. Then, my gagging was a response to a scene where, during an experiment, the narrator drilled a hole into her female subject’s head (“…in the side of her head, so as not to ruin her pretty face” (50)) so it could be filled with the cum of an anonymous stranger in order to determine whether or not cum, when applied to an open wound, might lead to a longer survival rate. This male stranger—a willing experiment participant—did, indeed, fill the woman’s head-hole with cum after fucking it enthusiastically. She, of course, did not survive. 

I’m now on my third Elsby book and what I love most about her work is that it’s always doing so much. Not only is she writing plot lines that are totally unique (yes, that is uncommon, especially in genre writing which can too easily fall into the trap of formula), creating imagery that is shocking in both its grotesqueness and its inventiveness, but she’s also doing this on the foundation of critical analysis. Elsby’s female characters are deep thinkers. They are animated by the intuition that all is not well, the belief that things could and should be better, and the desire to escape banality and subjugation. They do not want to be part of the system. They may want to be equipped to operate successfully within the system, to get by, but they are suspicious of it. Elsby’s theory-driven critiques are central to her plots and character development and they materialize in ways that are accessible even to readers unfamiliar with the central critiques. 

You don’t have to be a philosophy expert or an anarchist or a socialist or a democrat to shudder at the thought of being subsumed into the machinery of a profit-based organization. The thought is terrifying because it’s not only possible, but likely. Probable. Required, even, to play the game. And, although rarely publicized, all over the world, people actually do live where they work. In many factories, employees live on-site, sleeping in tiny bunks with no privacy, for months at a time because their rural homes are too far away for daily commutes and these factories provide the best employment (or only) options for their families. They have no separation between work and home life and often, few protections. 

Perhaps people who have been working from home since COVID can relate to some part of this. Cleverly, institutions have branded their flexible hybrid and remote employee options as evidence of being people-first organizations. In fact, allowing this benefits the organization far more than the employee. The greater the blur between an employee’s work and home life, the better for the organization. Think of all the overhead they’re saving from employees creating their own physical workspaces, at their own expense, with their own equipment, in order that the companies may save on real estate, utilities, office supplies. Think of the ways in which late-night and weekend texts have become normalized for WFH employees. All this without even a pay raise. Why? Freedom is the benefit. 

The live-at-work life is explicit for our protagonist Clarissa who lives on-site at The Organization. She likes how convenient everything is—that she never has to go far for sustenance, that couriers bring any online purchases directly to her unit, and that she no longer has to contend with the long walk to and from work each day. She likes the security that The Organization has to offer, the feeling that she’s part of something (anybody who lacks a strong family or social community can likely relate to this desire—it’s certainly what drove me to succeed corporately for so long). She also seems to feel comforted by the fact that no matter how little she accomplishes (as long as she accomplishes the bare minimum) or how much, she will always be referred to as “satisfactory.” 

Clarissa, an only child of two deceased parents, craves connectivity, Living at The Organization makes her part of its body, its systems. There’s safety in that. The Organization needs the work done each day that Clarissa does as a level 07, and she prides herself on ending each day in a way that would allow anybody to come in at any moment and just pick up where she left off. There is pride at The Organization in being dispensable. Because that’s what it means to do a good job. Nothing less. Nothing more.

“I take solace in how many officers there are and how,” Clarissa says, “in the event of an emergency, another one of me would take my place. There would be no interruption of my service” (7).

Clarissa goes on to explain that, “It is against every rule of decency to differentiate between us, and especially if that differentiation is an attempt to distinguish a better from a worse” (9), Clarissa explains, and this knowledge frees her from ever feeling compelled to do more than is required. Ego is an unacceptable attribute for a satisfactory employee. At least for, as we see, a female one. 

But Clarissa isn’t necessarily satisfied within The Organization and doesn’t accept the conditions of her employment uncritically. Throughout the text, we are pulled into recollections of conversations with a past lover, Maurice, who talked to Clarissa about freedom and agency. Cleverly, Elsby has created Maurice to be two-dimensional, a character who is able to talk about freedom because he has the privilege to. Clarissa deftly criticizes Maurice’s naivety as early as page two.

“Maurice, when he was around, used to argue that employment is a constraint… But Maurice didn’t know what it’s like to be really constrained. He’d never needed something he didn’t have. Having everything you need, I told him. That’s freedom. And since not all of us are born rich, we have to work.”

From the very beginning, the reader understands that Clarissa is happy to be part of The Organization for the same reason that each of us reading this book is happy to go to work every day. We go because we have bills to pay, and paying those bills allows us to continue to have homes to live in as well as money to do things with friends and take care of medical needs, for example, when they arise. We are happy to do the things—we, the people who were not born and haven’t become rich—that it takes to avoid a disastrous and miserable life. We are willing to do what it takes. We must do what it takes.

Freedom at The Organization is an illusion in the same way that freedom is an illusion under capitalism. Anybody who, unlike Maurice, must work for subsistence, is only free in an abstract way—free to choose between this career or that, this company or that, this specialty or that—but never free to choose not to work. Further, like in life, merit is also an illusion. The lie that hard work and dedication is the antidote to precarity and the assurance of reward, is what keeps us cycling harder and faster over and over in perpetuity while inching toward retirement. Life under capitalism, like life at The Organization, is a maze. Follow the cheese and you’ll never have to look far to meet your basic needs, but don’t expect to ever get far enough ahead to escape. Even the feeling of escape that leaving one job for another provides is an illusion under capitalism, because when profit is the motive, exploitation is foundational. The only way it works is to get more out of an employee than you give. The Organization knows this. 

In addition to serving as a commentary on freedom, financial privilege, belonging, and work-life balance— “We all get to log off eight hours exactly from when we log in…” Clarissa assures us by page five—it’s also a commentary on gender privilege. And this is what brings us back to the source of my disgust.

Devin Brault is The Organization’s quintessential frat-bro. We’ve all known or worked with somebody like him. He’s the type who feels entitled to the spoils that come with experience, but without actually gaining any experience on his own; who discounts the contributions of his female colleagues in order to make his own paltry contributions stand out as grander than they are; and who gets what he wants simply because he’s willing to grab it away from someone else. Reminds me of the two-party political system—the way the conservative party is able to get so much because they’re simply willing to, unabashedly, take it, while liberals expect that it’s actually possible for reason to prevail through the use of methods like patience, argument, and compromise (if you can call those methods). 

I gagged when Devin, an employee five levels below Clarissa started inappropriately delegating tasks to her, claiming it would be easier for her to “just do it” than for him to learn how. Is there anything more enraging than somebody skipping line? The exact moment of gagging came when, after pushing back, Clarissa’s boss encourages her to help him because he’s not yet “up to speed,” even though Devin’s demands clearly result from unabashed laziness rather than a lack of know-how. Even though doing so would prevent Clarissa from fulfilling her own purpose within The Organization, which was to satisfactorily perform the tasks expected of an 07. This creates a glitch—an opportunity—for Clarissa to feel precarious in a role which had previously felt secure. To question things. To become unsettled. The unspoken message her boss is sending is that The Organization is happy to assign two people to one job, which means one of them must be redundant.

Why is this so abhorrent? Because an undeserving man is jumping rank and the wind beneath his wings is the germane knowledge that he will succeed simply because he deigned to punch above his weight. And the ways in which his behavior is being rewarded directly undermines the professionalism of his female superior, Clarissa. But under capitalism, women are meant to be grateful for the job. To not ask for too much. To not expect accolades or to make their male counterparts look less dedicated by trying harder than or doing more than or expecting higher pay than them for better work. Women are meant to be patient and wait their turn and prop up their male counterparts at their own expense—to die to themselves, if you’re Christian, or to kill their egos, if you’re Buddhist.

My gag was one of recognition.

Precarity, obedience, agency, and gender inequity are prevailing themes within this bureaucratic satire, and while I don’t want to give away any spoilers, suffice it to say that in The Organization is Here to Support You, the figurative ‘maze’ is made real and it’s far easier for men to get around.

As Charlene said in an interview with Mae Murray, “I have argued that existence itself is horrific and all it takes to become part of the horror genre is to write down, without a filter, the things that happen.”

Is Devin’s crime really so different than fucking a woman’s head to death? The result is the same in the long run. Just that the hole in the head is quicker. 

 

You can purchase The Organization is Here to Support You here. To read an excerpt, previously published on Pool Party, click here.