We Are All Completely Fine

Group therapy did not strike me as a promising narrative framework, but this is a story by an author whose genre-bending novels have never failed to both entertain and impress me. Their bizarre premises allow Gregory's always believable and sympathetic characters to deal with grotesque situations and to sometimes perform outrageous actions in a world that has either subtly or spectacularly gone wrong. He twists horror, science fiction and thriller conventions into unique entertainments.

This novella is more of a straightforward horror story than anything I've read from Gregory. Jan Sayer is a psychologist who specializes in survivors of traumas that they insist had supernatural origins. Unlike her colleagues, she takes them at their word. Each character has quite a story to tell, and their narratives provide the horror elements of the story. They also have a part to play as the plot blooms into progressively deeper, more mysterious, and more dangerous territory. Gregory has taken classes are Miskatonic University, but even though Lovecraft may be the tutelary presence in his story, Gregory has not done a Cthuhlu pastiche. His place among writers of The New Weird is very much his own.

Gregory provides a satisfying conclusion, with surprises still coming in the last few pages. Perhaps the most unresolved element of We Are All Completely Fine is the narrative voice that moves us through the story. In other novels, Gregory has created characters with angelic presences or demons living in their heads. Here he transforms the convention of third person omniscience into a character that speaks to the reader like the whisperers heard by his traumatized protagonists.