The Haunted Workplace

Dot Van Jensen speaks to us from a distance. The disgraced tech founder at the heart of Melbourne author Pip Finkemeyer’s new novel, One Story, narrates the death of her old identity with the defensiveness of the accused taking the witness stand. From an island in Indonesia, she picks over the bones of her former life. She grew up in social housing in Holland. She once cleaned toilets at a train station in Spain where she learned that ‘her body was actually a cog in the world economy’.

Dot goes on to found One Story—an app that condenses all the world’s daily events into a single paragraph. In a trade-off that has become so common we barely notice it, the platform gives users their time back in exchange for their personal information: their ‘pulse, their breathing patterns, audio clips of their voices and conversations’. She soars high, landing on the cover of Wired, before a scandal unseats her and, accused of destroying democracy and heralding humanity’s demise, she’s forced to take refuge, hunted by a documentary crew.

The tale of the fallen girlboss: so far, so familiar. I’m thinking here of Sophia Amoruso making sandwiches at Subway while launching the vintage marketplace Nasty Gal—before she went bankrupt. Or Elizabeth Holmes, unmistakable in her black turtleneck and swipe of red lipstick, founding Theranos—the blood testing company that she claims will empower patients—before defrauding investors. Yet in Dot’s telling, which comes to us as if from another realm—strange and disembodied—these tropes (rags to riches to rags) feel like ruins or relics, their dramatic value neutered, as if they have become part of the slipstream of history, signifiers of a different time.

The tale of the fallen girlboss: so far, so familiar.

In his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher famously characterises the present by ‘the feeling of belatedness, of living after the goldrush’. He draws on Derrida’s concept of hauntology to point to not only the persistence of the past in the present but to the way we are caught between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’—shuttling between a world that no longer exists and a future that modernity has trained us to expect but that will not materialise.

Reading One Story, which intertwines the disgraced entrepreneur’s perspective with a collective ‘we’—the voices of employees who bought into the company’s mythology—I experienced an eerie sensation. It was the feeling of being suspended, floating outside systems that have now been exhausted of all meaning, leaving behind only husks.

Contemporary fiction about work has increasingly abandoned the realist mode, opting for something weirder, more surreal, slightly off-kilter. Take another Australian 2025 release, Stinkbug by Sinead Stubbins, described fittingly as a ‘corporate gothic’. In the novel, which shares One Story’s fear of encroaching doom, Edith, an advertising copywriter at an agency called Winked, embarks on a retreat with her colleagues in a former convent in the bush. There she is struck by a painting of a levitating saint called ‘Christina the Astonishing’. The retreat is run by a mysterious wellness outfit called Consequei which, according to one of its acolytes, Team Leader Una, strives to cure workers of their ‘addiction to cynicism’ by enshrining instead an emotional attachment to their jobs, the sense of colleagues not as participants in a shared vision but—that cliché of business-speak—as chosen family.

If, as Fisher puts it, the ‘abstractions of finance’ exist in our life as a spectre, then Stinkbug suggests the corporate workplace is a kind of haunted house—one which exploits our deepest human needs, framing them entirely in terms of the logic of the market. This impulse at the heart of Stinkbug is taken to its natural conclusion in Ling Ma’s brilliant 2018 novel Severance, where the payment an employee receives when terminated is a metaphor for the cultural and economic forces that estrange us from each other—and from ourselves.

Severance, which conjures a mood of free-floating alienation, reveals the way that capital has devoured our world’s connective tissue. It unfolds in a dystopia ravaged by a pandemic called Shen Fever, where people become trapped in the loop of their memories while their bodies deteriorate. The novel’s protagonist, Candace Chen, a Chinese American immigrant, gives up her dream of becoming a photographer to work at a book manufacturer, Spectra, that outsources production to Shenzhen. In her downtime, she uploads her images to a blog called NY Ghost. She haunts the abandoned city, chronicling townhouses, subway stations, a lady still working at a shop midtown ‘folding and refolding pastel polo shirts’ with ‘half her jaw missing’.

If, as Fisher puts it, the ‘abstractions of finance’ exist in our life as a spectre, then Stinkbug suggests the corporate workplace is a kind of haunted house.

In Severance, horror appears like this, piercing Candace’s droll narration: in Spectra’s allegiance to a global supply chain where Chinese workers contract lung disease; at a lavish Brooklyn party in which Candace and her flatmate serve shark fin soup, an outlawed ingredient and symbol of cultural dislocation. Severance recreates the malaise of the immigrant who has absorbed the privileges of the West and now must contend with its moral depravity, which reveals itself in glitches, like the missing body part on the production line, glimpsed and then swiftly forgotten, swallowed up by business as usual.

The terror that lurks under the surface of the book is about what we are now programmed to desire, representing a kind of shrivelling of the self. How, like Candace, to long for Friday night drinks, to spend your wage on Uniqlo cashmere or Blue Bottle Coffee, is to also occupy the place society has imagined for you: your existence confined to the paltry parameters of the worker, the consumer. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl also plays with perceptions of appearances and reality; in this case, how a benign corporate workplace—an all-white publishing house called Wagner Books—can be a front for racialised anxieties, the ghosts that still haunt, the well-meaning façade of the search for representation, the diversity initiative.

The 2021 bestseller follows Nella Rogers, a Black editorial assistant whose colleagues see themselves as progressive but are actually ‘self-important vampires’. It also introduces us to Nella’s stylish doppelganger, a co-worker called Hazel, and Nella starts receiving threatening letters.

For Hazel, the other Black girl of the title, fighting the system is futile. Instead she advocates for a hair cream that also nulls Black female pain, corporate success as a woman of colour and zombified surrender one and the same.

The ghost story, of course, proliferated in the West during the Victorian era, fuelled by the Industrial Revolution, anxieties about the soul and how society would fray in the wake of the movement to the cities for work. Technology—the telegraph, the railroad—was strange, disembodied, a threat to human connection. There’s a parallel with our moment now, defined by the existential threat of AI, a genocide livestreamed on our phones, evidence that the conversations about equality that exploded in the 2010s have changed course, proven inconsequential.

The girlboss is dead, but the neoliberal slogans she espoused—lean in, do what you love—still exist as spectres in the culture. The shifts towards quiet quitting or soft ambition don’t account for what it might take to support one’s family or oneself amid what the Guardian called, in an August 2025 report, ‘the biggest inflationary shock in a generation’. (An October 2025 Forbes study reported ‘job hugging’—the decision to stay at a job that pays—has replaced job-hopping and its attendant hopes of greater fulfilment.) Or for the fact that for people from low socio-economic backgrounds, striving in the workplace—achieving certain metrics of excellence—is often the bare minimum requirement, with Australian workers reporting hitting a ‘class ceiling’. A 2024 report also found that 68.4 per cent of Australian women of colour are being discriminated against at work, the percentage jumping by ten per cent over the last four years.

The girlboss is dead, but the neoliberal slogans she espoused—lean in, do what you love—still exist as spectres in the culture.

There are alternatives—for example, Keiko, the protagonist of Sayaka Murata’s sweetly surreal 2016 novel, Convenience Store Woman, disavows the desire for status in Japanese society by finding pleasure in the rhythm of her labour at a ‘Smile Mart’. But that this could be seen as a symbol of a woman’s nonconformity feels like proof to me of how much we have looked to work to provide meaning, to fill a hole that other forms of connection once did. When Keiko says ‘the sensation that the world is slowly dying feels good’, her radical nihilism reads more like submission. To celebrate her story, as charming as it can sometimes be, is to also subscribe to a culture that suggests it makes more sense for individuals, job-huggers among them, to surrender to the bleakness of the world as it is instead of dreaming up ways to live that honours our humanity.

I was depressed, at first, by the fact that in these novels about women at work, a marginalised identity—Dot’s queerness, for instance, or Candace’s status as a first-generation immigrant, or Nella’s Blackness—never, for all the platitudes we hear about diversity in the workplace, threaten the status quo. The fantasy of the girlboss, of course, is that an individual could ever triumph over systems that are designed at heart to commodify everything, including difference, and whose intentions are fundamentally extractive.

This illusion also tells us that work can absolve our deepest human needs. ‘My son had been my entire love life since the moment he was conceived,’ confesses Dot, her ambition partly motivated by the need to provide for him.

In Stinkbug, Edith has had her heart broken by her co-worker, Pete. Her relationship with her own mother is troubled, and Consequei’s team-building exercises grow unhinged. In one scene, Winked’s employees are forced to share their deepest traumas with each other—‘work should be love,’ says Team Leader Terry—and the tension ratchets up, bodies vomit and bleed, a fire threatens to destroy them. The reader, like Edith, experiences a fight-or-flight response that seems like a natural reaction to a world offering labour—and its emotional rewards—as the antidote to the ways we are failed by other humans, or a balm for our deepest psychological voids.

We see this too in Severance. Candace, who is trapped in a department that manufactures gemstone bibles, longs to be responsible for thick art books for publishers like Rizzoli. I recognise this longing for more meaningful work from my twenties, when I was a tech writer—the belief that the move from one kind of labour towards another, more aligned with my values, could somehow inoculate me from the structures of which all work is part.

The fantasy of the girlboss, of course, is that an individual could ever triumph over systems that are designed at heart to commodify everything, including difference.

Grieving the loss of her parents, Candace has been primed for immigrant success, but what does that mean when the terms are so demeaning? Severance’s title also refers to the splitting of an immigrant from their homeland but Candace, who has withstood Shen Fever, is living another kind of American Dream, an existence carved out in a city in decay along with a band of survivors who residing in a shopping mall.

If the world conjured by One Story reduces individuals to their browsing habits, Severance, which namechecks brands with surgical precision—Clinique, Ralph Lauren—imagines this moment in history as a graveyard where we are only ever the sum of what is sold to us—nothing more, nothing less.

In The Other Black Girl, Nella fights for clichés about Black women to be removed from manuscripts, but Wagner Books will always put profits first, art a saleable commodity designed first and foremost to flatter a consumer—like having a conversation with a chatbot, who simply reproduces sentiments that are part of its lexicon, rather than imagining something else. ‘The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations,’ writes Fisher. But reading these books together, I experienced the strange stirring of the opposite sensation. It was relief, at last, to witness a narrative mode that names these horrors precisely, that frames the world we have inherited in the language it deserves.

The women in these books are trapped between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’, stuck in a kind of purgatory, but there are moments too where they glimpse other ways of being: a kind of future that might not be lost to them. Candace, pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby, escapes the rot of New York City to start again in Chicago. Nella considers when she last felt free and rethinks corporate aspiration. In one of my favourite scenes in One Story, we meet Dot on the dance floor in Ibiza, imagining the internet in its early days, glowing pink, a mysterious organism, her body not a subset of data or ‘a cog in the world economy’ but a body among other bodies. The connection between people and the future not just nostalgic or illusory, but something that—despite the world’s attempt to vanquish it—lives and breathes.