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Due to our destructive behaviour, writer EO Wilson foresaw humanity soon entering the Eremocene – the ‘Age of Loneliness’ This fresh hell would be plagued by an environment void of the many forms of life we see and take for granted today, and, for us humans, result in existential and material isolation Perhaps it already feels this way Maybe we’ve discreetly slipped into the Eremocene without much fanfare It does seem sadly fitting that Wilson passed away at the end of 2021, a year overshadowed by isolation, and that we seem to be burning our way closer to a fully realised Age of Loneliness Also fitting is the appearance of Missouri Williams’s debut novel The Doloriad; a nihilistic fictional diorama into which she places her characters and watches them suffer      The Doloriad opens with a palpable sense of dread and a shimmering blackness in the language (The first chapter is appropriately titled ‘Prolegomena to Future Agonies’) Dolores, who is mute and has no legs, is stuffed in a wheelbarrow and pushed into the forest by her uncle, who is also her father She is soon abandoned as a marriage offering to a potential group of distant humans on the horizon If this feels too grim from the get-go, it’s not, because Williams is an intelligent stylist, deftly unfolding energetic prose reliant on her powerfully strange imagery: ‘Their uncle shuffled along with his unwieldy burden and the cracked lenses of his glasses repelled the sun; the light bounced away from him, splintering into new delusions, and those bright disks, fixed to the head and the long, dry stick of his body, gave him the appearance of a watchtower on the move’ It’s gorgeous stuff, weird and dark, more Thomas Bernhard and Deafheaven than Chuck Palahniuk and Korn   The bulk of the novel concerns a massive inbred family overseen by the Matriarch soon after a cataclysmic event that has left the world barren, except for a few birds, insects, a poisoned river and the ‘unbearable whiteness of the new chemical sky’ There’s Jan, Agathe, Marta, Mary, Adam, Jakub, legless Dolores