In Heather, G.C. McKay drags the modern world—Instagram filters, cancel mobs, incel forums and all—into a literary black hole. The result is a razor-witted, psychologically layered descent into obsession, alienation, and the blurred lines between villain and victim in a culture built on performative outrage.
Michael Harlow is a misanthropic barista in a painfully woke bookstore café, quietly raging against his Gen Z coworkers, social media dopamine junkies, and the grotesque theatre of modern virtue. When a rumour turns the staff against him and a dangerously precocious teenage girl walks through the door, things take a turn—from bad to bleak—to beautifully, horribly unhinged.
What follows is part Lolita, part American Psycho, and the meme-worthy absurdity of modern culture, if it had been ghostwritten by Dostoevsky after a bad night at the casino.
Heather is what happens when unreliable narrators start making sense, and the real monsters wear virtue on their sleeve.
Unreliable, uncomfortable, darkly hilarious and brutally self-aware, Heather holds a mirror up to a culture obsessed with optics and asks: what’s really underneath?
Yes, it’s disturbing. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it will probably offend you. That’s kind of the point.
For readers who like their fiction haunting, intelligent, and unapologetically bold.
Reader discretion is advised. Heather is not for the faint of heart or even mentally stable. If a certain trigger comes to mind, it is probably hiding away somewhere in this book.
You have been warned.
"This book is quite frankly, among one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read."
- Cody Sexton, A Thin Slice of Anxiety
"If all this book had going for it were perversion, there would be no reason to recommend it. What's most astonishing about Heather is how powerfully tender it becomes, how its mania dissolves into love and its cruelty folds into humanity. This book is quite frankly, among one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read."
- Cody Sexton, A Thin Slice of Anxiety
