The Body Builders, Albertine Clarke (Bloomsbury 978-1639737130, hardcover, 240pp, $26.99) February 2026.
Viewers of the film Mood Indigo (2023), adapted from the Boris Vian novel Froth on the Daydream, will recall a doomed love affair set amidst surreal antics in a surreal city, colorful and outrageous. The movie and book featured a kind of cosmopolitan, continental approach to fantasy—at least to my eyes—that differed from many American excursions into this realm. There was more of a sense of ennui and acceptance, as if falling into a bizarre Kindermärchen was a possibility that lurked around every corner in Paris.
Readers of Albertine Clarke’s debut novel, The Body Builders, will experience something rather similar, except for a lack of the gaudier effects. A blurb for the book speculates: “If Philip K. Dick had written The Bell Jar…” I find that observation pretty accurate, except that the kind of derangement of the senses and of common sense which Clarke portrays lacks the frenetic made-in-the-USA paranoia of PKD’s writings. Events proceed almost with a dreamy Alice in Wonderland flow.
Our protagonist, Ada, is a young single rather languorous and free-floating woman living in London and occupying a non-aspirational job. She is still in touch with both her father and mother, who reside separately, being divorced. Her coeval cousin Francesca—of a more vibrant, go-getter nature—is otherwise Ada’s only other real human contact. Ada is content mostly to live in nebulous daydreams, always feeling herself at oblique angles to reality. She also maintains a complex mental diary of her unusual somatic sensations and emotions.
One day Ada meets an older man named Atticus as they both lounge poolside. He exerts a strange attraction for her, and she for him. They begin to talk, and it seems as if they share more in common than possible for two strangers.
Ada looked at him. His gray hair was pushed back behind his ears. There was a strange, pulsing pressure in her head, as if she were sitting at a high altitude. She looked at Atticus’s hand and noticed that the ends of his fingernails were perfectly rounded. “I’ve been dreaming about you. I dreamt we were in a beautiful house with marble pillars and a terrace stretching out over the sea.”
“I had a dream about you,” Ada said. “I dreamt I had your body.”
This premonition of a body swap is about to come true. The affair with Atticus trickles off once he moves away from London, although Ada still continues to feel a fanciful bond between them. She next meets a fellow her own age named Patrick, and they begin a more prosaic relationship. But then out of nowhere comes a severe disjuncture.
Ada woke up in a white room that she had never seen before. She didn’t remember going home or going to bed. The first thing she noticed was that the light wasn’t coming from a single point, but from everywhere.
She was lying on a sofa. In front of it there was a table with a chair tucked under it. The room was perfectly square. On one side was a door. As she looked at it, she imagined who might come through it. The person she pictured was a man with smooth skin and blue eyes, dressed in a doctor’s coat. A moment after she’d thought of him, the door opened and he came in.
Ada is now inhabiting another dimension that seems to consort with mysterious images and impulses from her past. She learns that her entire life has been contoured by these Secret Masters, and that they have a new plan for her: “[W]e’re moving on to the next stage. We hope that a synthetic body will help you become more autonomous.”
Ada undergoes a mind-body swap, and a duplicate of her is also sent back to take over Ada’s life in London, while she remains in this new realm. Here, she has amazing mental powers which lead her into many George-MacDonaldish adventures. But finally she must return to our plane, even if imbued with a kind of Ubik-style entropic malaise. Can sheer human connectiveness save her, with Patrick perhaps? Or is Atticus still the necessary part of her life?
Clarke’s dry, deadpan, elegant prose is extremely effective at drawing the reader into the most outré situations, rendering them tactile and believable.
There was something wet on her neck. Touching it with her fingers, she wondered if it was blood. There wasn’t enough light to see clearly. She wiped her hand on her white shirt and nothing came away, but it kept trickling down her neck in a small stream. With her fingers she followed it up to the base of her skull. Her hairline was damp. She tried to stem the flow but it ran over her hand and down her arm. It was only when she moved her head forwards that she felt a long, narrow crack open up in the back of her skull. It was leaking salt water. Ada remembered jumping into the ocean. The water must have found its way into the body and corroded her from the inside, and now she was splitting open.
What could she do? Briefly she thought about killing herself. Was the man watching her? Someone walked past her in the dark, or she thought they did, and she flinched away from them. She took out her phone. It was just past ten. She called her father.
This Charles-Burns-style body horror—and the droll humor of reaching out calmly to Dad—are just two of the many primo effects which Clarke deftly summons up. Ada’s interior life, however abnormal, is also richly conjured, and the smallish cast is evoked with a telling particularity.
Clarke is rich in “negative capability,” that quality admired by Keats which allows the artist not to impose boring and limiting certainties on their narrative. Such inconclusiveness is not perhaps a flavor everyone likes, but I found Ada’s journey to have its own mystical arc and to be very satisfying.
With this book, Clarke joins the ranks of allied fantasists such as Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll, Robert Aickman, and Haruki Murakami as dealers in the mundanely unsettling and comfortingly unreal.
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