A vast system crash in the virus garden. Matthew Haigh’s second collection is a single, electrifying sequence on chronic kidney disease, dialysis, transplant and the body re-entering the world. With the cut-up wit and pop-cultural intensity that made Death Magazine a Polari-longlisted debut – now grafted onto something graver and more interior – God Mode tracks an illness through hospital wards, faux-medical letters, surgical theatres and the haunted spaces of online life. It is a queer survival narrative, a body horror, a prayer book for the age of the algorithm. A book about being saved, and what is lost in the saving.
