One friend cities away tells me to read a book, and the very next day my boyfriend gets in from work waving the hardback. He’s done with ‘There Is No Antimemetics Division’ in two days and hands me it with big eyes. But when it’s my turn, I find loads of black rectangles inside where parts of the story are redacted. This slows me down instead of speeding me up and I take a week, tripping over every kerb and then again when I try to write about it because I’m not sure I know what happened.

Loosely, the book is about a fictional agency in England that detains dangerous entities so they don’t wreak havoc across the world. That’s because these entities have the power to make people forget things, including the entities themselves. Agents are perfectly capable of taking pictures and writing descriptions of them, but when those same agents look back at the photos they took, or say they try re-reading their own notes, they cannot retain the information. Amnesia blooms like expanding foam inside their heads to the point where the agents are constantly having to be reminded what their job is. Like surgeons mid-operation forgetting where they are.

The enemies can delete themselves from history but other things get blurred too. These things could hold a massacre and we wouldn’t remember anyone had even died. And there are these huge obelisks jutting out of the Earth but no one knows they’re there because we can’t remember them well enough to see them. Invisible holes in cities, or not even holes, but places in the map that that have been folded over and then stapled down. We just can’t see the pleats.

And I like the imagery of the obelisks, the constant instability, and I like how memes are things that replicate endlessly so that we can’t forget them, and now there’s a story about the counter opposite. That’s when horror really gets me! When it picks at the part of the world I’ve made a nest in, put all my faith in, and branch by branch it removes safety from right under me. I really think the only way I can survive this life is if I accrue more and more information. More than you! A book about forgetting — a book full of redactions — tips me all the way out of my nest.

The story of ‘There Is No Antimemetics Division’ follows the director of the agency as she navigates the awkwardness of this line of work. It’s clever and fine-tuned. Writer Sam Hughes exhausts how many different ways he can tell this story so that it feels like he has built a mile-long maze inside a word search. To read it is to be constantly picked up and plonked down inside other parts of the maze. Reading is always like coming to and trying to get your bearings. Doing the same work as the director. I felt I really got my money’s worth as a reader.

Yeah, and I definitely enjoyed this confusion to begin with. I realised the book had become one of these weird entities, and in being constantly turned around by the writer, I was being made to forget its story. A week on, I couldn’t tell you with total precision what went on. I don’t mind that either. The performative utterance of it all! Horror following me outside the book! I completely respect its amnesiac power. But towards the end, I really lost motivation. I liked it on paper but I wasn’t gunning to finish it, and it wasn’t until I learned where the book had come from I understood why that might have happened.

Sam Hughes goes by the pen name qntm. It’s his username on SCP, a website that collects user-submitted stories all about the same fictional, secret organisation that captures and studies paranormal phenomena. Hughes had originally published a bunch of the jigsaw pieces of this book as posts over there under qntm. Here he’s stitched them together in one story, patching over the gaps to get it to stand on its own as a book.

I think the seams between the posts are well done, because even when it’s not seamless, that whole jigsaw comes together in a Google Dream-kind of image. Acidic and off-putting and entirely appropriate to the genre. But things definitely coalesce towards the end of the book, and all the off-angles become straight. I think it just gets a bit too normal when everything else had been so much the opposite. The same way someone’s voice changes when they’re wrapping up a meeting or a phone call. It made me remember I was reading a novel and I don’t think I wanted to? I was happy in the maze.

And this might not be fair to say, but I wonder if it’s like: all those stories uploaded on SCP in this grand collaborative collage don’t need endings in the same way as hardbacks. It could be a problem of translation from something read on a tab and then closed compared to something with weight read in an armchair. So the unfair thought is actually that the SCP posts are the art and what I experienced was the institutionalised sibling, all suited and booted. The outsider artist retrospective. The product that comes out the other end of the big loud publishing machine.

I want the writer with great talent and ideas bigger than I could ever hold to make money after sharing so much online for free. I hope he gets a TV series and films off the back of this. But when it comes to art, the raw material is what interests me most. I’ve probably gone about the work in the wrong order, haven’t I. And I say that knowing full well the friend wouldn’t have messaged me and the boyfriend wouldn’t have gone for the hardback if the publishing machine hadn’t printed this story off the internet and put it here in our bright, hard world. I wouldn’t mind forgetting the book so that I could read the posts he put online first.

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