The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

Review by Claire Carroll

What does it mean to imagine an apocalypse in a world that is wrenching apart? Apocalyptic novels often hinge on the idea that beauty, hope and love can be found in the wreckage. It is often the case that humanity is wiped out, but for a few plucky individuals, who show us that we, as a species, will prevail. A rewarding reading experience when done well but in recent years, the fight to survive after an imagined apocalypse has begun to feel all too prescient. What, then, is next for the form when we live in such turbulent environmental and politically destructive times?

The Doloriad, the debut novel by Missouri Williams, offers a lurid answer to this question. For writing that deals with what happens after the collapse of the world as we know it, it thrashes ahead into new territory. Side-stepping the trope of lonely survivors wandering a bleak and spare landscape in search of community, The Doloriad presents an undulating cast of characters who are, in their own perverse fashion, making their way in a world that has been decimated by an environmental cataclysm. These characters are multitudinous and depraved: a writhing, incestuous family. At the centre of the novel is Dolores, slow-moving and mysterious, struggling to take her place within a debauched company of relatives who are by turns cruel and tender, selfish and vulnerable.

Williams’ prose is dense and lavish, her characterisation is disquieting and her environmental descriptions offbeat, but razor-sharp. Phrases such as ‘Dolores shuffled in her skin as though she wanted to shuck it off’ or ‘Slumped in his chair like that, the schoolmaster looked like an old rag, thrown aside’ are unsettlingly lucid, and linger in the mind long after reading. But there is more to the prose than bright and arresting imagery. The form itself—an omniscient gothic narration—lurches from character to character, with few paragraph breaks, and scenes that meander in and out of chapters. Sentences stretch out and blur, blooming like a sprawl of lichen across the page. Other sentences abbreviate to tiny fragments. In this way, the form of the novel seems to echo the uneven sprawl of the family and its frighteningly porous structure; as Dolores notices: ‘Everything belonged to everything else, nothing was distinct’.

This style is a far cry from the sparing bleakness of other apocalyptic novels, where minimalism conjures a sense of humanity being stripped away to its essence, a stylishly starved emptiness. By contrast, The Doloriad’s density paints a picture of a human condition warped by unchecked abundance. The reading experience is like lifting a stone to see a writhing colony of worms beneath.

Worms feature heavily in The Doloriad, recurring metaphorically and rhetorically throughout the novel. As the story heaves towards its end, the voice of a worm becomes a sort of embodied conscience for Dolores. Beetles feature too, and moths flicker around the cantankerous school master. The gothic persistence of insects and invertebrates induces a sense of repulsion, but, curiously these animals also offer a glimmer of hope. The post-cataclysm world that Williams creates is cruel and frightening, the survivors are not brave nor strong, and yet some of the fragments of life as we would remember it, persist. Humans plunder new depths of chaos, but worms still burrow in the earth, moths are still drawn to the light. The unsettling idea that Williams seeds with The Doloriad, is not that we should fear humanity’s extinction, but that some distorted form of our species’ existence will continue. 

The Deloriad is published by Dead Ink, 4th March 2022

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