You Will Never Be Forgotten

Starred review from November 18, 2019
South debuts with a playful, astute collection about modern alienation. In “Keith Prime,” a nurse devastated by her husband’s death works at a “Keith Fulfillment Center,” where she goes against regulations by becoming attached to one of the Keiths, clones born and put into perpetual sleep before being harvested for body parts, “scooped out like ice cream from a bucket.” In “The Age of Love,” elderly men at an assisted living center begin calling phone sex lines, affecting the lives of the staff, including complicating the relationship between the narrator, who works at the center, and his girlfriend. “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy,” takes the form of a q&a in which a neurosurgeon’s unsettled personal life bleeds into her answers. In the title story, a woman who works at “the world’s most popular search engine” killing offensive and violent content begins to follow—first online, then in the real world—a man who raped her. In “Not Setsuko,” a woman raises her second daughter as an exact replica of her first child, who died at nine years old, down to killing the family’s cat on the day the first daughter lost her cat (“She loved the cat the second time as much as the first”). South’s stories are both funny and profound, often on the same page, but perhaps her best skill is plumbing the intricacies of loneliness, expertly dissecting what that term means in a technology-driven world. This is an electric jolt from a very talented writer.

January 1, 2020
Futuristic and of-the-moment stories that take aim at innovations that threaten to take us backward. In this debut collection, South crafts science-fictional scenarios that are just believable enough to be unsettling: In "Keith Prime," babies, born from artificial wombs, are drugged into "perpetual sleep," tended by nurses, and then harvested for valuable organs; and in "Not Setsuko," a mother who has lost her daughter seeks to "duplicate" her in a new one. To do this, she obsessively restages important moments from her dead daughter's life (like the death of the beloved family cat) and, failing that, makes the new Setsuko recite memories from experiences she's never had (like breaking her arm). Throughout, the characters are desperately unhappy and disconnected. Sometimes their coping mechanisms are so extreme it's hard to care, as in "The Promised Hostel," a meandering story that revolves around a group of damaged men suckling at the breasts of a damaged woman. But in the standout pieces, the characters' pain is deeply human and affecting. "Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy," an FAQ that goes off the rails, reveals that none of us is immune to loss, not even an accomplished neurosurgeon who opens skulls and faces death on a daily basis. And in "You Will Never Be Forgotten," a scathing critique of Silicon Valley and everything the internet has borne, the narrator is a content moderator at a popular search engine, which means she sits in a dark room all day reviewing "hate speech, gore, torture, pornography both adult and child, horrific traffic accidents, executions carried out by terrorists" and removing it. She has also recently been raped by a well-known venture capitalist. This story takes many brilliant twists and turns and culminates in an ending so surprising and inevitable Flannery O'Connor would surely approve. Stories more harrowing than your newsfeed on Facebook.

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December 1, 2019
South's odd and wondrous short stories take place in a near future in which people broken by grief and loneliness use and work with technology that is meant to cure, or at the very least lessen, their hurt. A woman grieving her dead husband works in a warehouse for humans grown solely for organ donation (a service not available to her family), internet trolls attend a rehab camp, a mother who lost her daughter tries to raise the second incarnation of her in the exact same way as the first. But in each case the very thing meant to help actually creates more problems. This has the effect of keeping character's humanness at the center of each story; appearing at first to be about the double-edged sword of technology, the collection is actually about people confronting their all-too-human emotions. While occasionally uneven, at her best, South is reminiscent of George Saunders, replete with strangeness and dark humor. This intriguing collection should put South on readers' radars and is perfect for fans of Black Mirror.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)