This novella is hard to pigeon-hole. On it's surface it's about two on-going events: a couple suffers through the loss of their 6-year old son and, at the wife's urging, begins to see a strange marriage counselor some distance into the country from where they live in Chicago. Meanwhile, a bizarre plague has broken out in Oregon, killing rapidly after a day or two of strange mental activity, at which point the body sheds first its skin, then bones and nerves, and finally disappears. While barely managing to go on with the their lives, the couple watch on the news as the plague moves across the country.

The story is told from the husband's perspective. There are indications that not everything he perceives is real, or occurring during his waking hours. Normally, this kind of plot would deter me from reading the book, but I found the story compelling, all the while wondering if the husband himself was sick and hallucinating the whole thing. I never did figure out exactly what was going on, but in the end that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the tale, so I'd have to definitely recommend it.

Nial Giacomelli's The Therapist, part of the Fairlight moderns novella series, is a searing meditation on loss expertly juxtaposed with a world ravaged by a devastating disease.

The story focuses on a couple who have lost their son recently to an accident, and is told from the husband's point of view as he attempts to deal with the conflicting emotions associated with the accident as well as attending therapy sessions with his detached wife. As they navigate their new normal, a new disease crops up on the west coast that causes mysterious symptoms and eventually forces its victims to disappear completely. The narrative flows back and forth between scenes of terror from the spreading disease and the husband ruminating on crucial times in his marriage and with their son.

The end result is a combination of bleak dystopia and an Edgar Allan Poe style unreliable narrator who is consistently trying to find meaning and place in a world quickly losing stability. It's not light reading despite being short in length, but it's one of the more poignant portrayals of loss I've read this year.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Fairlight Books..**

A previously unknown, fatal disease grips Oregon and then, eventually, spreads across the States. As panic mounts, the narrator and his wife Simone try to come to terms with their feelings of grief and guilt following the death of their young son in an accident. But will it be possible for them to save themselves and their marriage, while the world seems to be falling apart?

Nial Giacomelli’s engrossing and psychologically complex , published as part of the latest batch of Fairlight Moderns, borrows strongly from genre fiction. This is evident in its post-apocalyptic, dystopian premise, spiced with an element of body horror and an unreliable narrator worthy of the best Gothic fiction. One could also read the novella as a ghost story – possibly not in the traditional sense of the word, but certainly insofar as it explores the idea of how the dead remain with us, “haunting” our existence. Indeed, it soon becomes evident that the deadly epidemic, culminating in the dramatic ‘disappearance’ of its victims, is a novella-length allegory or extended “pathetic fallacy”: the large-scale manifestation or metaphor for the private grief of the protagonists.

As the novel progresses, the narrator’s dreams take centre-stage, and the mysterious figure of the (unnamed) therapist assumes an increasingly important role. Her questions tease out layer upon layer of meaning, leading to unexpected plot twists and turns and an ending which sent me back to the first pages of the book.