Viral: Stories

A guidebook tells visitors how to travel in a recognisable but dreamlike United States where mirrors are haunted and the Statue of Liberty wears a bowler hat; a supervisor in a department store must discipline his employees for failing to smile enough at their customers and finds himself unexpectedly drawn to the saddest of them all; a woman agrees to buy her daughter a robot pet to help her cope after a divorce, then is horrified when her little girl chooses an enormous spider for a companion. The characters in these mesmerising stories find that the world they thought they knew has shifted and changed, become bizarre, disorienting and occasionally, miraculous. Told with absurdist humour and sweet sadness, Viral is about being lost in places that are supposed to feel like home.