The fictional character Septimus Warren Smith, from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, is the first of many spectres to haunt the pages of Sam Sax’s incendiary, prose-poetic debut novel, Yr Dead. Midway through Woolf’s masterwork, the war veteran takes his own life – and this book’s epigraph, taken from Septimus’s narration, reads: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way.”
The novel begins with a heavy-content warning: it takes place in the brief intermission between its protagonist setting themselves on fire – at a march outside Trump Tower in New York – and their death. Reminiscent of Ocean Vuong’s lyrical meditations on identity and Maddie Mortimer’s inventive, formally ambitious Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Sax’s book traces the traumas and political rumblings (against a backdrop of the 2020 presidential election) that have led to this moment.
