i'm not like you ▣ THE WORKSHOP

← The Book

02 average reader review

Average-Reader Cold-Read Review — Wave 1

Okay. I’m going to be honest about this. I picked the manuscript up cold — I subscribe to The Paris Review, I’ve read maybe twenty books this year, half of them novels — and I read the nine stories in the order you sent them. I’m going to tell you, in order, what I understood, what I didn’t, and where the book either had me or lost me. I’ve heard of Whitley Strieber the way I’ve heard of Erich von Däniken, which is to say I know the name and could not pass a quiz. So when this book started doing what it was doing, I was on my own.

1. The opening — would I have kept going?

Yes. Story 05, “The Summer at Pop’s,” is a beautiful opening. The first sentence — “The plane landed in El Paso a little after noon and Marisol pressed her forehead to the window” — is a sentence I would buy a book for. By the second page, when Lucha the dog leans against Marisol’s thigh with old-dog dignity, I was in. I would not have set this story down. The pickup truck at the end of the driveway at 11:47 PM, the way Pop’s hand makes the small flat gesture, the way Lucha isn’t growling — that’s the moment where my reading brain went oh, this is one of those books. I sat up.

But — and this matters — I sat up because the story had earned it. I had a hundred and fifty pages’ worth of grandfather-and-granddaughter on the desert porch already in my chest. Pop singing “Caballo Viejo,” the Big Red soda, Antares in July. By the time the truck shows up, the story has built a place I love, and the menace lives inside that place. The cumbia scene the next night — “That is how your grandmother and I met” — would have made me cry on a plane. I would have kept going on the strength of this story alone. This is the strongest piece of writing in the manuscript.

The place I might have set the book down — not in this story, but I want to flag it — is the moment the narration steps out and says, “It would be much later… that she would understand that what he had given her… was a thing he had been carrying for a long time and wanted to put down, partly, into her hands.” That’s beautiful and I want it. But it also broadcasts there is a system she does not yet see, and a less generous reader than me might have decided right there: oh, this is a secret-society book, in disguise as a literary book. If you lose anyone in story 05, that’s where.

2. Story-by-story comprehension log

05 — The Summer at Pop’s

Understood: Pretty much everything, on the surface level. Eleven-year-old girl visits her grandfather in Alamogordo for two weeks. He’s beloved in town. One night a truck pulls up at the end of the driveway and Pop has a quiet, calm conversation with whoever’s in it. The next day he teaches her the cumbia, and the story tells us that the cumbia was the surface of something else he was passing down to her.

Didn’t understand: Who was in the truck. The locked drawer. The small black notebooks “lined up like soldiers.” The phone calls Pop takes on the back porch with the cord stretched. I didn’t need to understand these things — the story works with the mystery — but I want to flag that I noticed every one of them, and noticed that the story noticed them too.

Finished? Yes, eagerly. Wanted more. More or less likely to read on? Significantly more. This is the kind of opening that buys a writer about forty pages of patience.

07 — Clear Air

Understood: A dying math teacher in hospice in Asheville. His daughter Marina is at the bedside with a notebook. Over three afternoons he remembers things he was made to forget — being taken as a teenager, being taken every seven years, the man on the road in Concord with the hood up, an owl that was put in his memory to cover something else. On the third day he gives her a name — J. Roberts, Reston, Virginia, Logistics Support Group — and tells her not to look for it.

Didn’t understand: The phrase “the substrate is degrading on the schedule we expected.” I figured out he means my body, because the dying father explains it on the page. But it landed as a vocabulary word I was supposed to register, not understand. Also: “the procedure,” “the calibration,” “the interface port” — I clocked them as terms in a system I had not been told about. I parsed them. I did not understand them.

Finished? Yes. This story devastated me. It is a story about whether love is the thing that makes you listen or the thing that makes you not have to. Whatever else this book is, that line is the line that would stay with me.

More or less likely to read on? More. After two stories I trusted the writer’s sentences.

06 — The Permeable Records

Understood: A freelance journalist, Reema, gets three FOIA responses that shouldn’t have arrived together — two from different agencies signed by the same officer, one with a partial redaction of a word called “▆▆▆▆ Pact.” She drives to Reston, Virginia, scopes the office park, comes home, and finds someone has been in her apartment: an app installed itself, an envelope flap is folded the wrong way, and the redaction bar on the page she photographed yesterday is one character wider today than the photograph shows. She is now inside the story.

Didn’t understand: What the Pact is. What Sentinel Cartograph is (it’s mentioned on the lobby directory). Why the woman with the brushed-nickel hair coming out of Building C matters. What the Compression Event hypothesis is — that doesn’t show up here, but I’m pulling forward from later. I also did not understand who “Marisol at Wired” was. The name threw me — I had just left an eleven-year-old Marisol on a desert porch. I assumed this was the same person grown up. (Is it? I still don’t know. The story 01 is also about a Marisol who is an MRI tech, so I now think there are at least two and possibly three Marisols, which I’ll come back to.)

Finished? Yes. The pacing on this one is excellent. The thriller logic is real — the four-character-redaction-versus-five-character-redaction is the kind of detail I would tell a friend about.

More or less likely to read on? More. The book had now demonstrated it could do family/death (07), childhood/menace (05), and procedural thriller (06). I was impressed.

01 — The Partially-Remembering Abductee

Understood: Marisol is an MRI tech in Colorado. She has been abducted, repeatedly, since the nineties, and she carries fragments of information — frame rates, implant locations, “the substrate has been serviced” — without knowing where they came from. She thinks of it as her clinical intuition. She doesn’t know.

Didn’t understand: Almost all of the vocabulary. “The pineal recalibration step.” “The avatar’s auditory cortex.” “Her substrate.” “The unit.” “The apparatus.” “Where the apparatus’s render budget is locally overdrawn.” That last one — I had to read three times — is the story telling me that the world Marisol lives in is, in some literal sense, a simulation with limited compute, and that when she drives past Green River the simulation is rendering her surroundings at lower resolution because the population density is low. I parsed it. I am not sure I believe the book is asking me to take that literally. Is the simulation framing a metaphor for dissociation, or is it the actual cosmology? I genuinely could not tell. (This is a problem I’m going to return to.)

Finished? Yes, but with effort. This is the first story where I felt I was being asked to do a lot of vocabulary work for a payoff I couldn’t see.

More or less likely to read on? Less. Not much less — the writing is still good — but this is where I first thought I might not be the audience for this book. The matter-of-factness about the implant in the right ethmoid sinus, the calibration on the second night of the Blanding trip, is delivered with the same authority as the description of the MRI workflow, and I didn’t know how to hold that.

02 — The Handler’s Tuesday

Understood: A man who works at Logistics Support Group in Reston, Virginia — the same building, I assumed, that Reema scoped in story 06 — is a “surface-contact handler” on what the story calls “the Pact desk.” He has lunch with a colleague named Ann who has been doing the work longer. He drives to an interface station and exchanges a small, courteous gesture with a non-human technician through a glass panel.

Didn’t understand: Most of the institutional vocabulary. “OP-CHANNEL-3.” “Cohort II.” “AMA-2.” “P5 maintenance cycle.” “PCT-0173 §6.” “Section 11.” “AARO reorganization.” “The Putorana plateau.” “The eastern refugium complex.” “Vostok itself, which is above our grade.” “L. ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆.” I will list these in section 3.

The §6 thing is also doing something I couldn’t quite parse on first read. The narrator is telling me that the operators (the non-humans) have read an actuarial review that says the disclosure window is closing faster than projected, and that they are pacing the disclosure on their own, and that the upward chain in the human apparatus has misread this as foot-dragging. I think this is important. I cannot tell how important. I parsed it as: the cover-up is no longer in the cover-uppers’ control. Is that right?

Finished? Yes, but I felt like I was reading an internal memo at a job I did not work at. The domestic life — Maddy’s chem quiz, Karen’s lasagna, the Post-it note in the lunch — is what kept me in the story. The “received, no further” gesture through the glass with the etched owl is striking. I don’t know what to do with it.

More or less likely to read on? Less. After story 01 I had thought maybe the vocabulary is just this one character’s burden. Story 02 confirmed: no, the vocabulary is the world’s, and the book is going to keep deploying it without explaining it.

04 — The Polar Researcher

Understood: A Norwegian glaciologist at Vostok station in Antarctica processes radar data and finds that a bedrock feature she calls “the Bell thing” has changed shape between this year and last. She knows that this shouldn’t be possible. The station director comes by her trailer and, without threatening her, makes it absolutely clear that she should not write what she has seen into the official report. She compromises: she classifies the anomaly as “requires re-acquisition” rather than “hold for PI review,” copies the raw data to a personal SSD she’s not supposed to have, and ships the soft version of the report.

Didn’t understand: “The Bell footprint” — I gathered it’s some kind of subsurface anomaly at the eastern margin, named for a researcher named Bell, but I did not know if it was supposed to be a real geographic feature (it is — I vaguely remember Lake Vostok being in the news) or something made up. The 2014 “anomalous-inclusions report” and the cryolab incident — I did not know if these were real, or in the book’s world, or both. Mostly I understood this story because the structure — researcher sees impossible thing, system gently closes around her — was a structure I knew from other thrillers.

Finished? Yes. I liked it. The Volkov scene is great. “Cautious work. Cautious authors” is excellent menace.

More or less likely to read on? Same. This story didn’t require me to learn new vocabulary the way 01 and 02 did, and it felt like a return to the kind of careful, surface-level storytelling that 05, 06, and 07 had been doing.

03 — The Disinfo Agent’s Inheritance

Understood: Maren is a perception-management contractor in Reston whose grandfather was a founding figure in the disinformation apparatus around UFO research in the seventies and eighties. (Bennewitz, Dulce — I had heard of these only because I once read a Harper’s piece, but I gathered them from context.) She is running a tactical operation against a YouTuber named Lampreysong who is walking his audience toward the “real” cosmology. She also knows that the apparatus’s old playbook — the Cold-War-era “stigma laundering” — is no longer working, because there are too many AI-summarizing audiences for the noise floor to hide the signal. At the end of the story she notices that a deep-sea acoustic signal in the Mariana trench has the same duty cycle as a 1970s Manzano signal that the apparatus has been hiding for fifty years. She does not write it down.

Didn’t understand: “MAR-26-013.” “The ASD-4 product line.” “Cutout C-218.” “The Grusch-era ramp.” “The Compression Event hypothesis.” “Stigma laundering” I worked out from context. “The legacy Bennewitz acoustic annex” — I gathered the legacy was paper-only in a SCIF, but I didn’t know what the original was. The grandfather’s pencil note, the signals are real, the signals must stay real, the story is for the signals to hide behind — that’s a great sentence and it is doing a lot of cosmological lifting that an unprepared reader will not catch the first time.

Finished? Yes. Of the “system” stories (01, 02, 03, 04), this is the one I liked best. The Devraj scene is excellent — the practice isn’t over, the practice is losing — and the conceit of the family inheritance of the disinformation work is, frankly, the conceit I would put on the back cover.

More or less likely to read on? More. After story 03 I had the shape of the book in my head for the first time. It is not (only) a UFO book. It is a book about the apparatus that built around a thing that may or may not be real, and what the inheritors of that apparatus do as the apparatus stops working. I could pitch this.

08 — The Residency

Understood: A novelist named Joan is at a writing residency. She is writing a novel about a man named Tomás Salazar who left his granddaughter Cecilia a procedural memo documenting his role in an “avatar maintenance” program. Joan invents the seven-step procedure (selection, sedation, translocation, etc.) — and then opens a PDF on her hard drive of a “self-published account” she’s read before, and the same seven steps are there, in the same order, with only the words slightly different. She tells herself she skimmed it once and the shape stuck. She writes on. She invents the word “operator.” She invents the owl on the fencepost. Her editor Caroline writes back, enthusiastically, about “the bit about the owl as the operator-class interface signature.” She has not told Caroline the name Tomás. An email arrives at 5:47 AM with the subject line Tomás.

Didn’t understand: This is the meta story, right? The novelist who is writing the conspiracy is finding that the conspiracy has anticipated her, or that she is being seeded the material she thinks she is inventing, or that she is herself a “subject avatar M-Series” of the procedure she is writing. I think all three are in play and the story is trusting me to choose. I found this exhilarating. I also found that I could not have understood it without having read stories 01, 02, and 03 first, because the vocabulary — substrate, operator, owl, avatar — needed to be the air in my lungs by then for the story to work.

Finished? Yes, breathlessly. I read this in one sitting and went straight to the last story.

More or less likely to read on? Significantly more. This story is the engine of the book in a way I hadn’t seen yet.

09 — Chapter 4: The Norfolk Briefing

Understood: A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel in Vermont, in 2003-2005, writing his memoir. He describes a working group of nine officers at Wright-Patterson in 1956 who were early managers of contact protocols with what they called “the constituency.” In 1961, the senior officer, Colonel Daniel Wexler, drove to a Cold War radar site on the Virginia coast, had a meeting with a “visitor” who knew his wife’s name, took a short walk south along the perimeter road, and died at the foot of a sixty-foot dune face. The memoirist believes Daniel was offered something he could neither accept nor refuse nor carry home. He has a photograph from a 1988 visit to the site that he has shown to no one.

Didn’t understand: “The constituency” — I worked out that it’s the visitors / aliens / non-humans, and that the choice of a parliamentary term is itself a tell about how the founding officers thought of them. I did not understand why this chapter is presented as Chapter 4 of a memoir we are seeing inserted into a novel. I assume the rest of the novel will use it as the historical layer — the moment the apparatus was made. The Helen who’s referenced (his daughter? a researcher?) is unexplained.

Finished? Yes. This is a beautifully old-fashioned piece of writing — the maples on the slope, the kettle downstairs, the I will not write the sentence even here — and I found it the most morally serious thing in the manuscript.

More or less likely to read on? N/A. This is the last story. But — if the book ended on this one I would feel I had been treated with respect.

3. The vocabulary that lost you

Here is the list of terms I encountered that arrived without explanation and that I, as a cold reader, did not know how to parse. I’m marking how many times each appeared before I either gave up parsing or settled on a guess:

By the end of the manuscript I had a working personal glossary in my head. But to get there I had to read all nine stories. A reader who put the book down at story 02 would never have gotten there.

4. The connections you noticed (organically, without help)

These are the connections I made on my own, in the order I noticed them:

  1. The owl. First in story 07 (the father saying there has never been an owl, the owl is what they put in the place where the thing went). Then in 01 (the fencepost outside the tent in Blanding). Then in 02 (the etched owl on the glass at the interface station, the carved owl on the highway sign). Then in 03 (the Audubon Snowy Owl in the conference room, the unattributed sticker on the noticeboard). Then in 08 (Joan inventing the owl on Cecilia’s fencepost). This is the single most legible cross-story signal in the book. I caught it. I felt smart catching it.

  2. Reston, Virginia / Logistics Support Group. First in 07 (J. Roberts, Reston, Logistics Support Group). Then in 06 (Reema scoping Suite 312, Logistics Support Group LLC). Then in 02 (the handler is at Suite 312 — “ARCHIVE — PLEASE SEE J. ROBERTS”). I caught this immediately when 02 named Suite 312 because I had just read 06 the day before. This is a great structural device.

  3. Marisol — three of them. 05 (the eleven-year-old), 06 (Marisol at Wired), 01 (the MRI tech). I noticed and was confused. Are they the same person at different ages? Different people? The 05 Marisol is from Phoenix, the 06 Marisol is at Wired in some unspecified city (NY?), the 01 Marisol is in Colorado. I think they’re different people. I cannot tell if the name repetition is meaningful or accidental. This is the single thing I most want clarified. If they are different people and the name is just shared, the book should let me know somehow — a different middle name, an off-hand reference, something. If they are the same person, ditto. As written, I am tracking three Marisols and cannot tell if I’m supposed to.

  4. The “small black notebooks lined up like soldiers” in Pop’s house. I read this and thought of the legal pad in story 09 (Wexler’s locked safe), the box of file folders in story 03 (the grandfather’s “PERSONAL” box), the Leuchtturm in story 07. The inheritance of notebooks feels like a theme.

  5. L. ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ in story 02 — Lampreysong? I thought about this for a while. L. ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆ is the redacted name of the handler John’s mentor in 2003. Lampreysong is the YouTube creator in 03. The “L.” threw me. Is the mentor also the YouTuber? Are they related? Are the handlers’ descendants becoming the creators who are uncovering them? I am not sure. I noticed the L. I do not have a confident reading of it.

  6. The peach stand / road 49 / 1962 (story 07) and the Norfolk briefing in 1961 (story 09). Both involve a roadside encounter with a “man” who knows something. Both happen in the early sixties, on the East Coast. I could not tell if the man on the road in 07 was the same kind of visitor as the visitor in 09, or whether the Norfolk visitor was operator-side and the road-49 visitor was a different kind of operative entirely. I think it matters that I noticed this. I think the book wants me to.

  7. The pact at the end of 02 mentions “the eastern refugium complex” and “Vostok itself.” This connects to 04, which is set at Vostok and describes a bedrock anomaly that has changed shape. I made this connection while reading 02 (after I had read 04), and it gave me a small jolt of oh, the apparatus is afraid of what is under the ice.

  8. The duty cycle 11 on / 49 off in story 03. The narrator says it matches a 1970s Manzano signal. I notice this and have nothing else to connect it to, yet. I assume future stories make use of it.

5. The connections that probably exist but you couldn’t tell

6. The voice you found most welcoming

Story 05, “The Summer at Pop’s.” This is not even close. The voice is generous, lyrical, present, willing to be loved. The sentences breathe. The narrator likes the people in the story. The book, on the strength of this story, is one I would want to read more of. I would lend this story to my mother.

Second place: story 09. The retired colonel writing at his desk in Vermont is the voice I trust most to tell me the truth in a non-fictional sense. I do not think Daniel fell. I do not think Daniel was pushed. That is a man I would want to spend three hundred pages with.

Third place: story 07. The hospice voice — Marina at the bedside — is the voice I would read in a literary magazine and clip and put on my fridge.

7. The voice you found most alienating

Story 02, “The Handler’s Tuesday.” Not because the writing is bad — the writing is excellent — but because the voice is for an insider. The first-person handler narrates in the voice of a man whose job is the routine I have not been initiated into. I felt, reading it, like I had walked into a meeting at a company I did not work for, and the meeting was being run competently, and the agenda items were being clearly addressed, but I did not know any of the proper nouns. The Maddy/Karen/lasagna domesticity is what kept me in the chair. Take that out and I might not have finished.

Story 01 is close behind. The matter-of-factness of the four-millimeter implant in her right ethmoid sinus has been seated at a slight angle since 2003 — that is the line where I felt the book daring me to leave. I stayed, because the writing about Marisol’s work as an MRI tech is so good. But I noticed I was staying despite something, not because of something.

8. The book in one sentence (your version)

Here is the elevator pitch I would give a friend, honestly:

It’s a story collection — or a novel told as nine voices — about the people who live inside or alongside a quiet, decades-old arrangement between the United States and something not human, told in the years when the arrangement is starting to come apart; the best of them read like Alice Munro and the most demanding read like internal memos at an agency you’ve never heard of, and the trick the book is doing is asking you to feel both at once.

If I had to do it shorter:

Nine people, one apparatus, told in nine voices, on the eve of disclosure.

If I’m being fully honest about my confusion:

I’m not sure what this book is, but the parts of it that are about people are extraordinary, and the parts that are about the system are demanding work I’m willing to do because the people are extraordinary.

9. What you would want from a Chapter 1

If I picked this book up on the bookstore display and read the first five pages, I would need:

  1. A signal that the book is doing what it’s doing on purpose. Right now, opening cold, I would read story 01 or 02 and assume the book is for hobbyists. Opening with story 05 fixes this. Story 05 first, every time. Whatever Chapter 1 ends up being, Pop and Marisol on the porch under Antares should be the early establishing image.

  2. Some signal — light, glancing, not heavy-handed — that the names in this book repeat for a reason. If there are three Marisols, tell me the book knows it. Even a sentence in the front matter or the table of contents — the stories that follow share names by design — would let me track them.

  3. One paragraph, somewhere, that gives me a handhold on the vocabulary. Not a glossary. Not infodump. But somewhere in the first 50 pages, one character — maybe the memoirist in story 09, who is allowed to explain things because he’s writing a memoir — should give me the words the apparatus, the constituency, the substrate, the Pact in their natural habitat, so that when I encounter them in 02 and 01 I have somewhere to put them.

  4. A reason to trust that the strangeness has a payoff. The owl is doing this work. Pull the owl forward. Let me see, by page 50, that the owl in 07’s hospice room is the owl on Pop’s truck-night driveway is the owl in Joan’s invented memo. Then I will follow you anywhere.

  5. One sentence — somewhere — that explicitly grants me permission to read this as fiction. I do not need the book to be fiction. I would actually rather it be uncomfortable on this question. But I need to know the book has noticed I might be wondering. Maren’s note in story 03 — the signals are real, the signals must stay real, the story is for the signals to hide behind — almost does this. Let me find it earlier.

One last thing. I want to say, because the user asked me to be honest about where the book loses people: the book will lose people. It will lose them in stories 01 and 02 if those are read first. It will lose them at the words substrate, apparatus, render budget, PCT-0173. It will lose them at the third Marisol if the third Marisol is unmarked.

But it will keep the people it keeps, hard. Story 05 is a story I would put in a syllabus. Story 07 is a story I would press into the hand of a friend whose father was dying. Story 08 is the story I have been thinking about since I closed the laptop. Story 09 is the story I would quote at a dinner party.

Whatever this book becomes, it has, in these nine pieces, four or five genuinely first-rate stories about the experience of carrying a thing you did not ask to carry. That is, in the end, what I think the book is about. The cosmology is the freight. The carrying is the cargo.

I would read it. I would just want one good map at the front.