We Are All Completely Fine

We Are All Completely Fine is a fabulous, complicated novella about a group of five damaged people and the psychologist who brings them together. Dr. Jan claims she wants to help them, but the five members have been through various supernatural traumas and are accustomed to disbelief when they share their unlikely histories: “Every small group was a chemistry experiment and the procedure was always the same: bring together a group of volatile elements, put them in a tightly enclosed space, and stir. The result was never a stable compound, but sometimes you arrived at something capable of doing hard work, like a poison that killed cancer cells. And sometimes you get a bomb.“

The story becomes almost a character study as we find out show more more about each person, and the strange situations they’ve survived: “After all, one of the issue we had in common was that we each though we were unique. Not just survivors, but sole survivors. We wore our scars like badges.” But Gregory wisely stays away from historical info-dumping and instead allows their stories to be shared in the course of conversation. As they trust–and challenge–each other, they discover they have more in common than they expected. Shortly after, the pace catapults forward, focusing on immediate danger.

Gregory writes in ways that touch the heart of what it means to be human. He also writes in ways that are horrorific, surprising, and humorous. We Are All Completely Fine is like a psychotherapy text in comic book form, making it accessible and applicable in ways one would have never considered. There are moments that make me squirm, but they are done with such sophistication that Gregory brings me to a place of compassion.

“She believed that people were captains of their own destiny. He agreed, as long as it was understood that every captain was destined to go down with the ship, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it.“

Gregory is fast becoming one of my go-to authors, with stories I can pick up in almost any mood and end up deliciously satisfied. I want something with humor? Here: “And then he wondered what the collective noun was for psychologists: a shortage of shrinks? A confession of counselors?” Or profound: “What the patients didn’t understand was that this was the human condition. The group members’ horrific experiences had not exempted them from existential crises, only exaggerated them.”

Or do I need a diverting plot in a genre-bender setting to distract me from my everyday life? Gregory provides that too. I re-read this today thinking about my review, and was no less entertained or captivated–but I did highlight another handful of lovely phrases. I highly recommend it.

“Also, I might be entertaining the idea of tamping down my nihilism. Just a bit. Not because life is not meaningless–I think that’s inarguable. It’s just that the constant awareness of its pointlessness is exhausting. I wouldn’t mind being oblivious again. I’d love to feel the wind in my face and think, just for a minute, that I’m not going to crash into the rocks.“

Many, many thanks to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for a review copy, and to Carly for introducing me to Gregory’s works.

2017: Published (and signed!) copy: as fabulous as the advanced copy. Note that he also seems to be doing interesting things with the narrative voice. I think they were there before, but I glossed over. There's a mix of anonymous first person and third that's intriguing--maybe the group as an entity? show less

A very short book that packs an incredible wallop! This is the second book by Gregory that I have read and he is quickly becoming a favorite author. Gregory develops wonderfully flawed characters and places them into fully rendered worlds - and does so with nary a wasted word. This is story-telling that is direct, witty, smart, disturbing, and poignant. This guy needs to write faster because I am going to blaze through his catalog very, very quickly!

Okay, that was a trip. And not the happy, fun kaleidoscopic shapes and colors kind.

This is the story of a therapy group, through the eyes of Harrison Harrison, a member of the group and at least a local celebrity as a monster hunter. Harrison may be a monster hunter, but the other members of the group know monsters — they are all victims of attacks from “the other side."

- Stan is a surviving victim of cannibals.
- Barbara bears the scars of the Scrimshander, who opens his victims flesh to carve figures onto their bones.
- Martin is haunted by an ability to see into the other side when wearing high tech augmented reality glasses.
- Greta, the girl dressed head to toe in black, hides her secret for much of the story, but she’s clearly show more haunted.

And then there’s Jan, the therapist who has more going on than we know. Jan brings them all together, seemingly on the intuition that they are all connected in some way.

And that’s where the “monsters” come in. You’d think the Scrimshander was bad enough, but that’s an hors d’oeuvre.

These are creatures from “the other side,” normally invisible to us and incapable of interacting with us in our world. The monsters are looking for a way, a vessel, through which to enter our world. Or they have already found one.

There’s a very light tongue-in-cheek quality to Gregory’s writing — the characters, some of them anyway, are ready with quips, sarcasm, and irony. It’s still a supernatural horror story, and he doesn’t spare us any of the gory details, but there’s a saving lightness to the whole thing.

And there’s a quirky kind of positive vibe running through the story. The characters can deal with just about anything, and they will, one way or another. It won’t always be pretty, and they may not win all the time, but they are our team after all.

I’m not a horror story fan, so you may want to take that into account in my rating and review. I’m more drawn, for that matter, to the idea that “the other side” is more our own other side than any external force or malevolent influence. For my money, we, at least collectively, have proven ourselves as capable of evil as any monsters over there on the other side. show less

A group of strangers convene at The Elms for their first group therapy session. Unlike most people however, this group are all survivors of traumatic supernatural activity. Harrison was a monster hunter in his youth, Stan is a victim of a cannibalistic family, Martin can see otherworldly creatures that came out of his augmented reality game, Barbara has messages carved on her bones from the Scrimshander, Greta is the last member of a cult that went up in flames. Dr. Jan Sayer believes them all. The group makes headway with their issues, but not before their monsters catch up with them.
A complex and fast-paced horror novella about confronting your demons both internal and external. Each of the characters has been through something show more horrific, gruesome and unique, something they think no one else would understand. I was very interested in all of the characters and what they went through. I was engaged by how they all dealt with their past trauma differently as well as how they were dealing with what was in front of them at the moment. The connections between the characters was unexpected, especially since they all were dealing with different monsters. Greta's character seemed to take front and center as her monster caused the most trouble and led to the danger that forced the group to work together. I feel like there is more to the story for these characters, but they were left in a place that is good for now.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review. show less

"We Are All Completely Fine" is a novella is about sole survivors of extreme traumas with a supernatural not-credible-to-the-authorities flavour, who are brought together by a psychiatrist to "work" in Group Therapy sessions. As time goes by, it becomes clear that the group has not been assembled randomly and that their status as survivors may be only temporary.

It sounds like a good, compelling thriller. It isn't. It's something else. I'm just not sure what.

The book is disturbing and difficult to listen to. The violence and inhumanity that the members of the Group have been through is extreme, repulsive, and shared in an almost off-handed manner that makes it quite chilling. The crippling impact of these events on their lives, sometime show more decades later, is entirely believable and deeply sad but the style of storytelling, nested in the context of "Therapy" and delivered with a sort of distant intimacy, that reduces the emotional impact until what is left is a kind of unempathic voyeurism.

Daryl Gregory writes well, so I'm sure the tone of the book is deliberate, I'm just a little lost about what it is supposed to achieve.

For example, each chapter starts from the point of view of an anonymous person who, from their use of the term "We", seems to be a member of the Group; yet, in a number of cases, this anonymous narrator refers to all the members of the Group, one by one, without using the term "I". It is skillfully done. It contributes to the clinical but intimate feel of the story. I assumed I would eventually find out who the narrator was and why they'd been kept anonymous. If Gregory did provide an explanation, it slipped by me.

Perhaps I'm being obtuse in not being able to work out why Gregory used this conceit rather than a more conventional authorial voice but this tale doesn't have enough substance in it to make it worth my while to work that hard.

The end of the book felt anti-climatic to me. Perhaps Gregory wanted to stress that in life no story ends but for me, reading fiction rather than philosophy, it felt like the author either wimped out off writing a longer novel or had extended a short story to the point that the impact of the ending was lost.

I loved Gregory's writing but I finished the book feeling disappointed. show less

I quite enjoyed this gruesome but not repellant story of five victims of horrific crimes or events who are brought together into group therapy. The characters and their interactions are interesting, although the collective narrative is a bit confusing at times. Surprisingly for me, a person who tends to think every book is too long, the ending here seems a bit rushed. Perhaps 20 or so more pages could have fleshed things out a bit better. I guess I just had to get "flesh" into it somewhere, since it has so much to do with this highly unusual, well-written story. I will definitely investigate the author's other writing.

In this novella, five survivors of horrific supernatural events gather together for a group therapy session lead by the enigmatic Dr. Jan Sayer. Harrison was considered a hero as a teen, but now he’s in his thirties and can’t sleep at night. Stan was partly eaten by cannibals. An unearthly killer carved mysterious messages onto Barbara’s bones. Greta is covered with strange scarring, and Martin refuses to take off his sunglasses.

While there is a more traditional plot going on in the background, the heart of the novella is the characters. The novella doesn’t use flashbacks, but the characters do describe what happened to them. All have their scars, and none feel at home in the ordinary world anymore. All of them were reluctant to show more come to therapy, except possibly for Stan, who will talk over and over again about the trauma he went through. Yet, together, they find people who are able to understand something of what they’ve been through.

"He was suspicious of the very premise of therapy. The idea that people could change themselves, he told Dr. Sayer in their pre-group interview, was a self-serving delusion. She believed that people were captains of their own destiny. He agreed, as long as it was understood that every captain was destined to go down with the ship, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it. If you want to stand there with the wheel in your hand and pretend you were steering, he told her, knock yourself out."

We Are All Completely Fine is a complicated, dark story with a cast of damaged people at it’s core. I would highly recommend it, and I hope Gregory decides to write a sequel.

Originally posted on The Illustrated Page. show less