Stinkbug

Corporate horror is the hot dish right now, and while office life has long been artistic fodder, there seems to be an increased fascination with it. Is it a post-Covid, hybrid hangover where work–life balance, for those who can indulge in such thoughts, is the conversation de rigueur? At any rate, I am here for it as a form of snarky cathartic escapism, which Sinéad Stubbins delivers in spades in Stinkbug.

The setup is simple: Edith is a woman who has moulded herself to fit into her world – both at work and beyond. She has recently broken up with her boyfriend, a popular co-worker who increased her social currency at work. He made the ambitious Edith seem more approachable, softer. But he has just been unceremoniously fired, a Swedish company has taken over the advertising firm where Edith works, and a number of the staff have been selected to take part in a company retreat, where they are told that if they don’t find a work friend by the end of the week there will be consequences.

Despite the uncoupling and firing, Edith is set. She has a work buddy in Mo, and they are solid. But as the days unfold, it is clear this is not going to be a breeze after all. Edith battles with her inner demons (of which there are many), the bro-culture of her advertising world, gaslighting (which she also dishes out), and her place in the company social structure as a single and, let’s be real, prickly woman. As Edith and her world slowly unravel, I found myself being pitched back and forth between sympathy and dislike. Edith is a fabulously unreliable narrator, but her whole world is full of unreliable narrators, to the extent that by the end of the novel I wasn’t sure, in the best possible way, what had actually happened – or why. But then, perhaps not entirely making sense of this corporate, capitalist, patriarchal madness is the point.