A common critique I’ve seen of cosmic horror, the subgenre pioneered by writer and notorious racist HP Lovecraft, posits that the genre is fundamentally about white men realizing that they aren’t in fact the center of the universe. This rings true for Lovecraft’s fiction and quite a few of his many progenitors and imitators. Classic genre tropes concern unsuspecting explorers, scientists, or occultists happening upon evidence of unfathomable beings or forces that in comparison make the story’s protagonist look like an ant who is forced to comprehend the inner workings of a helicopter. For a demographic who has been told, especially in fiction, that their lives are shaped first and foremost by their own actions, the concept that they are in fact nothing more than a bothersome spec in the eye of eons old deity is genuinely terrifying. And sure, I’ll admit happening upon unknowable cosmic forces is a frightening concept regardless of context, but the horror rings differently for those who’ve never really been granted societal agency in the first place. Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom does a phenomenal job at reclaiming one of Lovecraft’s most abhorrently racist stories and twisting it on its head, ultimately claiming that cosmic indifference is almost preferable to the day-to-day malevolence of white supremacy. Despite its racist and colonial origins, cosmic horror still has potential to unnerve and terrify. The future of the genre lies in reclaiming, reframing, and redirecting its points of view and its monsters.

Aoife Josie Clements’s debut novel Persona at first may not seem like a work of cosmic horror. Instead of explorers trawling the depths of Antarctic caves or bohemians encountering cursed stage plays, Persona’s protagonists are lonely trans women avoiding eviction through a combination of sex work and filling out paid surveys for a mysterious marketing corporation. Annie, the first of the novel’s deuteragonists, is a feral shut-in, who outside of bouts of sleepwalking hasn’t left her apartment in months. Even before her cisgender boyfriend dumped her, Annie had succumbed to the pressures of depression, social isolation, and disposal by a capitalist system that cannot find a place for a body like hers. She wades through an ever-growing mountain of garbage bags and subsists on nothing but ramen noodles and wine that she has delivered to her doorstep. The decaying monotony of Annie’s life is interrupted when she happens upon amateur porn starring a woman that looks identical to herself. Annie has no memory of filming the video and no explanation for who her doppelgänger might be but soon finds herself falling down an internet rabbit hole with a destination that holds unimaginable horrors.

There is so much I want to say about Persona and the brain-melting and destabilizing places it takes its characters, but it’s a book that is best experienced cold. Reading Clements’s novel feels like being guided by an unknown hand through a winding pitch-black house that smells familiar but putrid in equal measure. I wouldn’t dare send you inside with the lights turned on. I’ve rarely encountered anything like the disorientation and discomfort that Persona creates during its first third, and wading through Annie’s trash-buried existence without a clear direction in sight only makes the revelations and monstrosities that await even more frightening.

And Persona is horrifying. Even if Clements’s voice-y prose and narration do skew decidedly more to the literary side of “literary-horror,” genre fans are still sure to be satisfied. Annie’s search for answers may be a slow burn, but when the horrors playing at the narrative’s periphery do make themselves known, Persona charges forward with a demented and unrestrained passion for the grotesque and uncanny. Clements conjures horror imagery here that is among the most unsettling and disturbing I’ve read in recent memory, evoking but never mimicking the likes of Clive Barker, Jeff Vandermeer, and William Joseph Martin. If horror fans are willing to stick with the unconventional narrative and style, they’ll be rewarded by what may be the most frightening novel of the year.

This isn’t to say that what makes Persona such a standout work of not only horror, but cosmic horror, is merely surface-level commitment to horrific imagery or violent plot twists. No, what this novel aims for is much more existential and terrifying. Like LaValle, Clements understands that the threats of the supernatural or unknown must contend with the familiar horrors of our everyday reality. Persona’s protagonists are doomed even before the darker truths about their lives begin to seep through the cracks. Rejected by their families and disposed of by an exploitation economy that sees no worth for their existence outside of the objectifying desires of cis men, Annie and the other trans women that Persona follows are already aware that there are reality-shaping forces outside of their control. Their lives are hardly their own to begin with, but Clements digs deeper, daring to ask if the banal evils of transmisogyny and capitalism were actually far more sinister than they already seem.

Again, to say more would be a disservice. While Clements has written a strong enough book that it will drag a reader into its nightmare logic regardless of what they may know before cracking open its pages, I wouldn’t want to deny anyone the full experience of what she has to offer. Few books have left me quite as uneasy and out of balance as Persona. I finished it and immediately needed to take a hot shower and also curl under a blanket for as long as I could. Even if it deserves wider recognition, I think it’s already clear that Persona is a cult classic of literary horror in the making, and you should absolutely let it ruin your day as soon as possible.

Persona by Aoife Josie Clements is out now.