... a succession of nine quietly horrifying stories from a dystopian, pastorally radiant England ... The novella is suffocating...in part because of its odd depth of focus. The dystopia is distant and lightly sketched ... It is also disturbingly intimate ... The episodes in They seem to take place at different stages of the disaster; you’re never quite sure whether it is just beginning or hope is gone. The pages seethe with casual violence ... The book veers between the rapture of individual escape and the paranoia of being targeted for precisely that longing. They is dark, but the light never quite goes out ... The book is supple with dread.
... [a] disquieting, lean, pared-back dystopian tale ... much of the novel’s power lies in its mystery ... Given that Dick made a habit of loosely fictionalizing her own experiences, I’ve come to think of her protagonist in They as female. Even more inscrutable though are the 'they' of the book’s title...extremely dangerous and violent, but also strangely vacant and automaton-like. 'They' are rarely distinguished as individuals, which situates them in stark contrast to the narrator and her acquaintances ... It’s chilling, but compellingly so. All the more so because of the seamless way in which Dick stitches together what’s an evocatively drawn portrait of otherwise idyllic rural England with this shadow landscape of fear and violence ... There are many ways to read the book: as a straightforward Orwellian dystopia, a sequence of vividly drawn nightmares, or...perhaps even as a metaphor for artistic struggle ... Like any strong allegory, They can be read many ways, but is perhaps best, and most accurately, read as a plea for individual and intellectual freedoms by a woman artist who refused to...live by many of society’s rules.
They is spare, troubling, eerily familiar...occupying a space between dystopia and horror. The lush landscapes are haunted by profoundly unsettling details about the forces at work ... Art is strangled: capitalism, commerce, governments, institutions, bigots, scolds, cowards. In this context, They feels nearly paralysing. What is to be done in the face of this loss, evil, calamity? Kay Dick tells us. Or, at least, she gives us an opening, a small and meaningful door[.]
Dick’s lush, transcendent nature writing contrasts with her spare, elliptical dialogue ... Each chapter features a new, seemingly interchangeable cast of artists, whose relationships with the ‘unnamed, ungendered’ narrator are indistinct; what matters is the different ways they cope in extremis. For They is a study of fear. Its disconcerting power lies in its dream logic and elisions—the unexplained background, the offstage violence. Exploring the purpose of art and the psychology of peer surveillance (shades of lockdown), it begs the question: if ‘the other’ is subjective, aren’t ‘we’ also ‘they’?
Harsh punishments await anyone bucking society’s norms in this eerie, atmospheric story from English writer Dick ... In place of plot, Dick creates a pervasive sense of dread for those who give their lives to art. This unsettling dreamlike endeavor is a worthy rediscovery.
