Julius Julius. Aurora Stewart de Peña. 2025.
Debut. Satire. Surrealism. Workplace fiction. Canadian literature.
Inside the world’s oldest advertising agency—a surreal architectural wonder as old as Western civilization—three distinct employees across different eras grapple with bizarre absurdities, hauntings, and moral compromises while fulfilling their professional duties.
Three different narrators take turns telling this story. Each is from a different era of the company’s impossibly long history. And each describes their experiences working at the agency.
This is a Lynchian story. Its vibe is constructed from an eerie, dreamlike collision of the pedestrian and the mundane with the macabre and the grotesque. As a result, the story is loaded with surreal scenes and situations.
Everything we produce as artists in this surreal late stage capitalist system, de Peña seems to be saying, comes from a place of trauma. Whether we produce that trauma ourselves or appropriate it from others is irrelevant. The system we work within is built to exploit the art we produce and repackage it for resale in a corporate marketplace. And in that process, both the artist and the originating trauma are consumed.
AUTHORS – I write short book reviews that focus on voice and vibe. They are useful to querying authors searching for comp titles. There are more like this on my website.
REMINDER – If you follow my reviews, you already know this. I have a policy about reviewing debut novels. Provided I finish them, I always rate debut novels with maximum stars, regardless. When I don’t finish a debut novel, I don’t review it. No exceptions. And I don’t review books I don’t pay full price for.