September 06 2025, 13:46

we had to remove this post

Author: Hanna Bervoets

First published: 2022

~25,000 words. Six chapters/acts. First person, Kayleigh, as a letter to Mr Stitic, a lawyer.

Kayleigh has received several emails from Mr Stitic, a lawyer at a firm bringing a civil action against Hexa, the company Kayleigh used to work for. She was in a team that moderated social media posts, taking them off the site if they broke the rules. The rules are detailed and specific, and while the staff have aggressive targets to meet each day, they are also expected to be accurate in their assessments.

Her team is a group of misfits, like any team, but bound by the horrors they are obliged to sit through for their job. They try to abstract themselves from the images their minds are assaulted with through a mixture of denial, camaraderie, substance abuse, and an almost religious respect for "the rules". We are given brief sketches of the awful things people do (and want to share!) through examples of the assessments, but the story is really about Kayleigh's patterns in toxic romantic relationships with other women.

The toxicity of the job brings out a slowly increasing extremism in everyone, and the reader begins to wonder how much to trust Kayleigh's account of things. The finale involves a question about violence and consent. The story falls apart in the final third because the conversations about the extreme views being represented are clunky and obvious, and the relationship Kayleigh is in feels thin. There isn't much depth to it all. But it was compelling enough for me to finish it in a couple of days.

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