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The Vivisectors
Not yet published
Expected 26 May 26A reclusive graduate student is forced into a friendship that destabilizes her life in this surreal, allegorical romance.
In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved—not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all.
Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.
In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved—not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all.
Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.
- GenresLiterary FictionFiction
288 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication May 26, 2026
183 people want to read
About the author
Missouri Williams
3 books139 followersMissouri Williams is a writer and editor who lives in Prague. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Astra, Granta, and Five Dials. Her first book, The Doloriad, was published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Dead Ink Books in the UK.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
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November 26, 2025𖤐✮⋆˙♱𝕻𝖗𝖊 𝕽𝖊𝖆𝖉𖤐✮⋆˙♱
A dark academia that would make me want to slice open a piece of my head to peer into my mind (grotesquely put but ykwim) ?
Yesss plssss
𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱
PS- I would like to thank NetGalley, the author and the publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book in exchange of my honest review. Thank you!
𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱
REVIEW TO FOLLOW SOON
A dark academia that would make me want to slice open a piece of my head to peer into my mind (grotesquely put but ykwim) ?
Yesss plssss
𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱
PS- I would like to thank NetGalley, the author and the publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book in exchange of my honest review. Thank you!
𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱
REVIEW TO FOLLOW SOON
November 17, 2025
This has affected me deeply... makes me want to be different but I'm not sure in what way
November 20, 2025
A very consuming read, I really enjoyed the flow of this book and the narrator. This book is some really relatable themes like academic drama, career chaos, family drama, and discrimination. Loved the suspense throughout and the way it shows how communication or lack thereof can affect things. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Want to read
October 20, 2025I read books about graduate students to overcome my own trauma of being a graduate student hehe!!
December 2, 2025
eARC provided by Netgalley in exhange for an honest review.
I'm not really a big believer in the 'show, not tell' advice that is often given to writers. I believe a certain amount of balance is required. Like, I don't need to read three pages describing a room—just like I don't need to be spoonfed every detail about a character's personality through exposition.
In The Vivisectors we encounter a strange case: in each section of the novel, Williams is doing one or the other. There is no balance or equilibrium here. Everything is either handed to you, over and over again, in short, sharp sentences, or drawn out over endless paragraphs.
There is a lot of repetition in the writing, and it doesn't seem stylistic. Rather it feels like I'm getting hit in the head with information that could be, instead, passed onto me in a natural way. For example, towards the end of the novel: That evening my uncle had visitors. Then, later in the same page: My uncle's friends were visiting him, and he had opened the doors to the library.
Every time a plot point is set in motion Williams forces it to a halt by info-dumping on a new character, community within this world, past event, or by going on a rant about politics or literature. It makes for an agonizing read. It feels like a constant push and pull—or maybe like a tug of war where Williams is dangling me over the edge of a precipice. Look at this cool thing I wrote! she screams over at me. I try, helplessly, to climb up the rope of her endless, meandering paragraphs, to reach stable ground for even a minute. Only to have her pull me over another hole the next second.
I'm naive and hopeful. I want to attribute this to a lack of editing, and have it not be a choice made by Williams. But then there are moments where the point she's trying to make becomes clear, and I'm left bitter and disappointed. Like when te narrator describes herself as having a rock inside of her: But at the center of my soul there was a big dead rock that wanted nothing to do with anything else (...) She uses that same metaphor consistently throughout the book, so much so that it gets tiring.
Most of all, though, I have to admit I'm confused. I'm not really sure what Williams is trying to do here. She seems to be making fun of herself a lot of the time. A character goes on a multiple page rant about the current lack of quality of modern literature, and he exemplifies this decay by pointing out that most contemporary narrators don't have names—much like Williams' own, which remains unnamed through most of the book. But she also seems to take herself extremely seriously, especially towards the end of the book, within the tight, messy frame she developed.
In a slightly fantastical world of unnamed cities, where nature seems to run wild and grow into huge, lush gardens that no one can keep at bay, Williams seems preoccupied with our own world's problems. She talks about academic decay, immigration and cancel culture within a university structure—problems of which I know nothing about, having escaped from college as quickly as I could. As a result, none of it interests me. I can't say it's entirely her fault, as my deep uninterest in academia stems from my childhood and has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. She does, however, fail to make me interested in any other aspect of this novel, which is the important part here.
Where, in The Doloriad, the characters harshness and bleakness contrasted against their world's own disillusionment, in The Vivisectors the characters blend in and fade against their city's sterile backdrop. None of them are well constructed or developed throughout the book. They all seem like rounded stereotypes, with one or two definiting characteristics that the author exploits over and over again, to no avail. The main character is angry and unfeeling—her boss is needy and stupid—Adam is charming, but empty—her mother tried to kill herself.
The novel, which has a cold, eerie feeling throughout, turns into a mushy love story in the end. I had expected that, and it's precisely because of it that I hoped the author, whose past work I have loved dearly, would prove me wrong. She didn't. In my mind The Vivisectors is a small, metal ball. It's clean and shiny, but impossible to hold on to. It slips between your fingers and it makes a lot of noise when it hits the ground.
I'm not really a big believer in the 'show, not tell' advice that is often given to writers. I believe a certain amount of balance is required. Like, I don't need to read three pages describing a room—just like I don't need to be spoonfed every detail about a character's personality through exposition.
In The Vivisectors we encounter a strange case: in each section of the novel, Williams is doing one or the other. There is no balance or equilibrium here. Everything is either handed to you, over and over again, in short, sharp sentences, or drawn out over endless paragraphs.
There is a lot of repetition in the writing, and it doesn't seem stylistic. Rather it feels like I'm getting hit in the head with information that could be, instead, passed onto me in a natural way. For example, towards the end of the novel: That evening my uncle had visitors. Then, later in the same page: My uncle's friends were visiting him, and he had opened the doors to the library.
Every time a plot point is set in motion Williams forces it to a halt by info-dumping on a new character, community within this world, past event, or by going on a rant about politics or literature. It makes for an agonizing read. It feels like a constant push and pull—or maybe like a tug of war where Williams is dangling me over the edge of a precipice. Look at this cool thing I wrote! she screams over at me. I try, helplessly, to climb up the rope of her endless, meandering paragraphs, to reach stable ground for even a minute. Only to have her pull me over another hole the next second.
I'm naive and hopeful. I want to attribute this to a lack of editing, and have it not be a choice made by Williams. But then there are moments where the point she's trying to make becomes clear, and I'm left bitter and disappointed. Like when te narrator describes herself as having a rock inside of her: But at the center of my soul there was a big dead rock that wanted nothing to do with anything else (...) She uses that same metaphor consistently throughout the book, so much so that it gets tiring.
Most of all, though, I have to admit I'm confused. I'm not really sure what Williams is trying to do here. She seems to be making fun of herself a lot of the time. A character goes on a multiple page rant about the current lack of quality of modern literature, and he exemplifies this decay by pointing out that most contemporary narrators don't have names—much like Williams' own, which remains unnamed through most of the book. But she also seems to take herself extremely seriously, especially towards the end of the book, within the tight, messy frame she developed.
In a slightly fantastical world of unnamed cities, where nature seems to run wild and grow into huge, lush gardens that no one can keep at bay, Williams seems preoccupied with our own world's problems. She talks about academic decay, immigration and cancel culture within a university structure—problems of which I know nothing about, having escaped from college as quickly as I could. As a result, none of it interests me. I can't say it's entirely her fault, as my deep uninterest in academia stems from my childhood and has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. She does, however, fail to make me interested in any other aspect of this novel, which is the important part here.
Where, in The Doloriad, the characters harshness and bleakness contrasted against their world's own disillusionment, in The Vivisectors the characters blend in and fade against their city's sterile backdrop. None of them are well constructed or developed throughout the book. They all seem like rounded stereotypes, with one or two definiting characteristics that the author exploits over and over again, to no avail. The main character is angry and unfeeling—her boss is needy and stupid—Adam is charming, but empty—her mother tried to kill herself.
The novel, which has a cold, eerie feeling throughout, turns into a mushy love story in the end. I had expected that, and it's precisely because of it that I hoped the author, whose past work I have loved dearly, would prove me wrong. She didn't. In my mind The Vivisectors is a small, metal ball. It's clean and shiny, but impossible to hold on to. It slips between your fingers and it makes a lot of noise when it hits the ground.
November 22, 2025
The wheelbarrow makes a return! Love to see it!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
dnf
November 27, 2025Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux | MCD for providing me with the ARC.
Pub Date May 26 2026
This book was a very painful read for me, the writing style is very dense and at the same time it feels empty. The sentences are long and stuffed; the descriptions are prolonged and the plot is very little. Up to the 30% I still have no idea what is this book about. Usually I love this type of weird fiction, but here I find everything meaningless. I wanted to give the author another try, because this book still has something intriguing about the reality of the world it creates. The only understanding I could get from the heavy narrative is that there are big overgrown gardens, that are encircling the cities and the gardeners are the people who can tame the flora and keep it at bay. This is some kind of a dystopian fiction, but I couldn’t get into it. I tried to read this author’s other novel as well and I also tried with this one but I am officially giving up at the 30%. It’s just not for me.
Pub Date May 26 2026
This book was a very painful read for me, the writing style is very dense and at the same time it feels empty. The sentences are long and stuffed; the descriptions are prolonged and the plot is very little. Up to the 30% I still have no idea what is this book about. Usually I love this type of weird fiction, but here I find everything meaningless. I wanted to give the author another try, because this book still has something intriguing about the reality of the world it creates. The only understanding I could get from the heavy narrative is that there are big overgrown gardens, that are encircling the cities and the gardeners are the people who can tame the flora and keep it at bay. This is some kind of a dystopian fiction, but I couldn’t get into it. I tried to read this author’s other novel as well and I also tried with this one but I am officially giving up at the 30%. It’s just not for me.
November 28, 2025
"And so the villagers buried the little white whale and continued to wait for their little white whale."
Absolute masterpiece.
Absolute masterpiece.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews