Review: The Felicity Complex by August Clarke, at Locus


The first of my three reviews in the August 2026 issue of Locus is now online, and it's of a book that I hope to see getting a lot of attention as the year draws to a close. August Clarke's second novel, The Felicity Complex, is a delightfully disquieting horror/SF mashup about an artificial being recruited to act as hostess in an underground bunker. As I write in the review, this is a fusion of two of the most popular SFnal ideas of the last few years.

There is the apocalypse bunker, the idea that the wealthy and powerful can ride out nuclear war, climate catastrophe, or social unrest in a secret, luxuriously appointed underground location. And there is the fembot, an artificial creation made to look like a woman and thus treated like one – often, like the most abject and powerless of women – who must decide how they feel about this.

It's surprising that Clarke appears to be the first writer to combine these two premises – the matter of staffing an apocalypse bunker is, after all, one that seems to occupy a lot of the mental energies of people who intend to live in them. To that already promising mixture, they add a further complication. 679-b and the other specimens are not robots. There are dark hints throughout the novel’s early chapters about their nature. Flesh that is removed from the specimens' bodies continues to move; people ex­posed to it worry about cancer. And, after the sale to Mr. Pink is announced, one of the doctors takes 679-b to a utility room and tries to set her on fire: "they're going to be all over you. Close quarters, no escape, breathing your air and eating food you've touched and fondling you and so on. It's not right. It's not safe."
You can sense the echoes of a lot feminist dystopias in The Felicity Complex—I was reminded, for example, of Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men, which also takes place in an underground bunker in a post-apocalyptic future. But in Clarke's dystopia, the imposition of gender on beings who may not desire it is as evil—and, ultimately, as destructive—as gender-based prejudice and oppression. This is yet another way in which this delightful, disquieting novel innovates on a storied and vibrant subgenre. Read the whole thing.

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