Welcome to the end of the American dream, served lukewarm from the microwave of post-capitalist despair and garnished with crust punk regret. Margie Sarsfield’s Beta Vulgaris is a heartbreak horror story wrapped in a grunge-blooded road trip novella, all soaked in the lukewarm runoff of a country that forgot how to love its youth. If Raymond Carver and Kathe Koja shacked up in a Walmart parking lot during a nationwide sugar beet harvest, this would be the foul and beautiful baby they left behind.

This is a horror novel without a single jump scare, yet it aches like bruises you don’t remember earning. It’s about the monstrousness of financial precarity, the hauntings that follow queer desire, the way love can rot in real time when placed under the weight of poverty and expectation. And damn if it doesn’t do it with style.

Margie Sarsfield is a name that, as of now, doesn’t come with an extensive back catalog or literary cult, but if Beta Vulgaris is any indication, she’s clawing a bloody space into the scene whether we’re ready or not. Her debut reads like someone who’s been paying close attention to the lineage of body horror, queer literature, and millennial collapse fiction. The ghosts here are economic, systemic, relational, and weirdly sexy. That’s a trick most horror writers don’t even try pulling.

Elise and her boyfriend Tom head from New York to the American Midwest to participate in the annual sugar beet harvest, which has become a weird subcultural mecca for workampers, anarcho-degenerates, and late-capitalist drifters. Their goal? Make some cash. Maybe stabilize. Maybe survive. But between Elise’s financial desperation, her attraction to the charismatic Cee, and the slow collapse of her relationship with Tom, what should be a dirty, boring, painful working-class gig becomes a descent into something quietly apocalyptic. People vanish. Things rot. Love curdles. Elise is left with herself—and that’s the worst part of all.

Capitalist Collapse as Horror: Beta Vulgaris is more than a character study—it’s a quiet scream against the gig economy and the myth of bootstrapping. Elise is perpetually broke, drowning in debt, haunted by a motel overcharge, unable to afford basic comfort, and deeply ashamed of it. The horror here is the banal kind: overdrafts, loans, rashes that might be bug bites or might be psychosomatic rot, the degradation of romance under pressure.

Rot as Metaphor: Everything in this book is decomposing: relationships, plans, identities. The symbol of beets, and the physical labor of piling them until they form a grotesque mountain, becomes a loaded metaphor for emotional accumulation, for the parts of ourselves we hide and haul around. There’s a line between decay and transformation, and Beta Vulgaris dances on it with grim delight.

Queer Longing and Uncertainty: Elise’s desire for Cee simmers with intensity, shame, and confusion. She isn’t just bi; she’s burdened with the indecisiveness of all queer women who’ve spent too long in hetero relationships. The horror comes not from the crush, but from the self-loathing it awakens. Sarsfield captures queer desire as something potentially liberating but also sharp and dangerous—like flirting with a fire you know will consume you.

The Fragility of Identity: Elise is haunted by her past selves—her broke college version, her dreamier pre-Tom self, her inner scared child. Sarsfield lets these versions overlap in scenes that feel like mirrors shattering one by one. There’s no core Elise, just a pile of past failures, trying to hold it together with duct tape and dollar store cigarettes.

Sarsfield writes like a depressive God with a Tumblr account in 2013 who discovered prose-poetry and decided to burn the world down with it. The voice is intimate, neurotic, dryly funny, and stunningly sad. The prose is sensory without being purple, with line-level craft that elevates even the most mundane scenes—like motel check-ins or beer runs—into gut-punches of existential dread.

Here’s what’s most impressive: Sarsfield doesn’t lean on horror tropes or plot pyrotechnics. Instead, the book hums with a low, anxious frequency that never breaks. This is emotional horror in its most distilled, nerve-jangling form. Imagine Midsommar but with overdraft fees instead of flower crowns.

There are no monsters here except for the ones you make by being alive too long in a world that keeps asking you to smile while it starves you.

Strengths

• Voice and Characterization: Elise is one of the most vivid, frustrating, painfully real narrators in recent horror fiction. She’s selfish, depressed, insecure, tender, and deeply relatable.
• Atmosphere: The book is steeped in a uniquely American decay—chain motels, Midwest fog, and the smell of rot under everything.
• Queer Themes Done Right: This is bisexual disaster fiction without condescension or cliché. The longing is raw, and the betrayal is all too human.
• Emotional Impact: You will feel bad reading this book. That is a compliment.

Critiques

• Pacing: Some may feel like “nothing happens.” And in a traditional plot sense, that’s partially true. But this isn’t a book about narrative escalation; it’s about emotional erosion. Don’t expect monster battles. Expect moral collapse by inches.
• Slight Thematic Overlap: At times, the book risks redundancy. Elise’s anxieties loop back on themselves in ways that feel accurate but occasionally exhausting. A few scenes blur together.
• Minimal Payoff on Disappearances: Characters vanish mysteriously, and while that adds to the surreal tension, readers hoping for a concrete explanation will be left cold. On purpose.

Think Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed meets Toni Morrison’s Beloved if the ghosts were replaced by debt collectors and queerness was a smoldering cigarette between every scene. It also echoes the dread-infused atmosphere of Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea and the crushing economic terror of Ling Ma’s Severance.

Beta Vulgaris is gorgeously written, thematically rich, and emotionally brutal. Its intimacy and rawness are rare and unforgettable. It doesn’t redefine horror, but it re-centers it in a realm too few authors dare explore: the quietly dying soul of a millennial woman with no way out.

TL;DR: A horror novel about money, longing, and identity crisis that feels like a breakup text wrapped around a molotov cocktail. There are no monsters, just the ones in your checking account.

Recommended for: Anyone who has ever cried in a Motel 6 parking lot while their ex listens to Minor Threat.

Not recommended for: Folks looking for action, gore, or literal demons. Unless you count capitalism, in which case this book is crawling with them.

W. W. Norton & Company
Published February 11, 2025