Review- Persona Combines Horror with Mundanity

By Jane Migliara Brigham

What if you found an identical version of yourself somewhere in the outside world, and you stopped at nothing to find her?  So begins the story of Persona, the debut horror novel by Aoife Josie Clements.  

She has already made a name for herself as the Executive Producer of the Castration Movie Anthology, working alongside the recent star of trans cinema, Director Louise Weard.  In Castration Movie Part 1, Aoife plays a leading role as Adeline, a freshly out trans woman figuring out how to survive in a world that she no longer understands.

The story of her latest work is about a trans woman searching for understanding by tracking down her (very literal) other half, an identical copy of her that she has no knowledge or memory of.  It is only through her search for someone exactly like her can she understand that she is not fully alone in the world.  This goal is how she finally makes something of herself.

Her goal leads her to investigate the holes in her memory.  Our protagonist has only the spottiest memory of her past, and has so thoroughly dissociated through her own life that she struggles to understand her own present.  Her story is told through the few moments where she is lucid enough to understand what is going on.  

The picture we get in those windows is bleak.  She is marginally employed by answering surveys from a company she knows nothing about, and has no knowledge of the outside world which does not come from her computer screen.  The only place she can turn to for help is an anonymous forum (stand-in for 4Chan) filled with the worst people on the planet.  Her impression of the outside world is so bad that we mostly see her view of it through flashbacks. 

Our other viewpoint character is in a similar dilemma.  Rather than filter the world through her computer screen, she filters it through her own sexuality, the only part that people around seem to ever care about.  Sex is how she makes her money, it’s how she makes and keeps friends, it’s how she interacts with the outside world.  As far as anyone else can tell, it is her entire persona.

Both characters end up isolated in the same way by different means.  Whether by only finding worth through a computer screen, or by finding worth by putting out, these trans find their niche, and allow it to become their whole personality.  This is, of course, no way to live, and the plot of the book is about fixing this.  

That is easier said than done.  The tone of the book is based around the horror of the unknown, and seeing how isolated the characters are, that includes just about everything.  Much of the tone of the book is lifted directly from Castration Movie.  The main cast is composed of trans women with good hearts who nonetheless utterly fail to have meaningful lives.  In response, they cling to any sense of meaning that they can find, and hold on for dear life.  This grows harder and harder, as the mystery of their missing memories only becomes more pressing over time.

The reader is forced to stew in this feeling.  The whole book is spent grasping in the dark in hopes of finding something to hold on to.  It is that mystery that gives the book its power.

Sadly, I can't go into too much detail.  Explaining all the ways in which this book is able to tell its story would mean explaining the mystery itself, which would kill the suspense of reading it.  However, it is the kind of work that is best enjoyed over multiple readings, since the payoff of understanding the story is immense.

Just as much of the tone and style overlap heavily with Castration Movie, so too does its appeal.  If you have an opinion on the former, you probably know how you will feel about the latter.  I for one love both.  Castration Movie was the best movie I saw all year, and Persona was the best novel I read all year.

If you want trans horror, I can think of no finer example than Persona.

Disclaimer: I was given an advanced review copy of the book by the publisher Little Puss Press in exchange for writing a review on it.