What a splendid, jewel-box-like, precious novel - minute and inlaid with such empathic dedication you have to stop and breathe through the beauty of some sentences. The language of this book is opaque, in the best sense of the word: thick and alive in its own right, a second layer spread over the characters. It is holy, and profane, and fierce and impossibly delicate - and the mythical feel of it lingers for days under your skin.

This book is... changing me. Reshuffling the pieces of me. Unfolding things and worlds I had just the vaguest grasp on. It took me a while to get into its strangely meandering, dry writing - to let it enter and infect my system, which is fitting for a book so ripe with mentions of bodies and things growing and dying under the earth - but boy, it was worth it. I'm rushing through the last sixty pages and I found myself choking back sobs on the bus.

Nearly done with Authority and - still loving it. Still being plagued and tormented by it, and the painful humanity of Control, and the writing, the luscious, sharp, terrifyingly imaginative writing of this story. I will miss his voice; I will miss the little human things peppering this deeply inhuman (or in love with the inhuman) world, the cat Chorizo and the carved chess pieces. I will miss Control's messiness, so much like mine own.

Perhaps the best Atwood book - at least for my Victorian-loving, luscious-writing-slave, history-adoring self. As claustrophobic as The Handmaid's Tale, and as piercingly intense too - spearing you like focused sunlight.

As uncanny as it is well-written, much like Annihilation - though I am probably liking Control more than our awkward intriguing biologist. This book haunts me even when I'm not reading it. I won't have it any other way.