A spectre is haunting England in the surreal tales assembled in Ben Pester’s Sail Away Land, the follow-up to his debut collection Am I in the Right Place? (2020) and last year’s novel The Expansion Project: the spectre of tweeness. In the end, his anxiety about his grill setting fire turns out to be well-founded. At the heart of the story lie the myriad ways we conceal the horrors of everyday life with equally noxious fictions. Whether you’ll play along, however, will ultimately depend on whether you accept Sail Away Land’s obvious premise: that a society as grotesque as ours can only be caricatured in bludgeoning phantasmagoria.