Never has the title of a book so accurately summed up my experience of reading it. A collection of linked short fictions, Sisyphean kicks off with a “fragment”—less than a page of gnomic gesturings toward some grand cosmic scheme-of-things—before sliding straight into the titular piece, which netted Dempow Torishima the Sogen SF Short Story Prize in 2011. “Sisyphean”, the story, might be summed up succinctly: subordinate employee in mutant biotech hellscape has a particularly bad day at the office.

Indeed, there’s something Kafkaesque about the nameless worker’s narrative: while they’re perpetually baffled by their circumstances, to the point of being unaware of their own identity, it is plain to the reader that they’re ensnared by late-late-late-capitalism in a twisted distant-future groundhog day where the very worst (and least plausible) aspects of genetic engineering have run grotesquely amok. But Torishima’s text lacks the subtle yet acute sense of the absurd that leavens Kafka’s fiction. “Sisyphean” is never funny—even when it feels like it’s reaching for levity, the on-the-noseness of the metaphor turns an elbow in the ribs into a punch to the gut. For instance, the hapless worker’s boss is literally of another species (or perhaps just a different clade of posthuman, if that’s a meaningful distinction); as concretised metaphors go, this should be instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation. As such, one might expect Torihsima’s two-liner about the worker trying to communicate an urgent issue and their boss quite literally “not having ears to hear him” to raise at least a wry chuckle. But I found it merely added one more bleak block to a looming babel of misery which, even by this early point, I was tired of climbing.

Perhaps it’s the literality that does it—that, and Torishima’s enthusiasm for microscopic detail in worldbuilding. The slightest action on the part of his narrators prompts a cascade of description and portmanteau neologisms that remind us, over and again, that we are no longer in bioKansas: characters, settings and objects are depicted in gross-out detail, as if show-don’t-tell had been tied to less-is-more using ropes made from flayed lamprey skin before being tossed into a seething pit of barracuda-worms with human eyes. Like a cheap horror movie, the more it shows, the less scary it becomes… but cheap horror movies sometimes accrue a redeeming risibility in the process. Instead, “Sisyphean” simply became ever more like rolling a vast slimy boulder up an infinite slope for no reason that this reader could adequately recall: grim, icky stuff happens in grim, icky settings, until the grim, icky end. There’s no redemption, no shafts of light, and the merest vestige of story. At a quarter, perhaps a third of its length, “Sisyphean” might have channelled Kafka as dreamt by H R Giger after a dodgy kebab; as it stands, it’s as interminable and unpleasant as the poor worker’s career. (I suppose one could thus argue it represents an epic doubling-down on totality of theme.)

Sisyphean, the collection, contains three more such novellae (and a few more fragments); I must concede to having only been able to endure two before giving up. With regret: because Torishima’s gift for worldbuilding shows promise, and because he’s addressing the labour experience—something that science fiction, with its traditional focus on action heroes and/or professionals, rarely dares to approach. But to this reader at least, Torishima’s writing is as dense, relentless and noisesome as the world(s) he dreams up; trapped on a long train journey with Sisyphean, I found myself turning by choice to an academic textbook on object-oriented ontology, because I knew it would be an easier and more enjoyable read. Your mileage, of course, may vary—but if so, I hope you’ll forgive me begging off from movie night at your place.