“A creepily prescient tale in which anonymous mobs target artists and destroy their art for the crime of individual vision. Insidiously horrifying!”

– Margaret Atwood

"They is spare, troubling, eerily familiar. It evokes Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge, or Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, occupying a space between dystopia and horror. The lush landscapes are haunted by profoundly unsettling details about the forces at work—'It was no good listening for footsteps,' the narrator tells us, 'they wore no shoes'—and all of it a backdrop for endless questions about art: What does it mean to create for no audience?"

– Carmen Maria Machado, The Guardian

“Queer, English, a masterpiece.”

– Hilton Als

“It’s incredibly unusual to find a book this good that has been this profoundly forgotten.”

– Sam Knight, New Yorker

"Both a dystopian fable and a stealth memoir . . . Like all robust allegories, They grants the reader the freedom to imagine any number of vivid referents for the opaque."

– Melissa Anderson, Bookforum

“Dick’s lush, transcendent nature writing contrasts with her spare, elliptical dialogue . . . [it’s] a cri de coeur against urbanization . . . They is a study of fear. Its disconcerting power lies in its dream logic and elisions—the unexplained background, the offstage violence.”

– Madeleine Feeny, The Spectator

“[A] stunningly effective dystopian nightmare . . . Could there be a more fitting moment for the revival of Dick’s uneasy little masterpiece than our own era of isolation, fractious culture wars, widening intolerance, and environmental decline?”

– David Wright, Library Journal (Starred Review)

“[A] disquieting, lean, pared-back dystopian tale . . . One element that makes the book especially disturbing is that “they,” whoever they are, are not a government-sanctioned group like Bradbury’s firemen or Orwell’s all-pervading government surveillance, but rather an unsanctioned multitude, the strength of which appears to lie not in official mandates, but rather in the swell of their ever-increasing numbers . . . It’s chilling, but compellingly so.”

– Lucy Scholes, Paris Review

“A tension of glinting malice pervades the narrator's episodic travels . . . here is a liberatory current of queer and nonmonogamous love and desire running counter to the increasingly stifling oppression enacted on the populace . . . Dick’s dreamlike rendering of virulent conformity and a quotidian bloodthirsty anti-intellectualism still resonate. A timely reissue of English author Dick's slim dystopian fever dream.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“Eerie, atmospheric . . . The faceless nature of the antagonists—whose philosophy, goals, and power structures are unspoken—runs counter to other mid-century dystopian tales and leaves space for interpretation . . . Dick creates a pervasive sense of dread for those who give their lives to art. This unsettling dreamlike endeavor is a worthy rediscovery.”

– Publishers Weekly