The Expansion Project by Ben Pester

It is hard to know where to start with a book like Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project. Possibly the best thing is to consider what it resembles. The Expansion Project is a surreal deconstruction of modern corporate culture that reads a little like The Office as written by Franz Kafka by way of the podcast Welcome to Nightvale. It is in turns scary, scathing, insightful, achingly sad and compassionate. And despite its complete weirdness does not fail to hit its target.

The book opens with a narrative from a man called Tom Crowley. Tom talks about the day he took his six-year-old to his office at a place called Capmeadow for ‘bring your daughter to work day’. Even their commute, which involves his daughter wandering away at the train station, is fraught. But worse is when his daughter goes missing while at the office. Only it turns out that Tom never brought his daughter to Capmeadow, that she was at school all along and while he was looking for her, she was safely at home. That does not stop Tom continuing to look for her on the office campus, convinced that she is still there.

It is revealed fairly early on that Tom is telling his story to someone. The narrative then becomes a series of connected stories of people who work at Capmeadow that are being captured by someone called ‘The Archivist’. Other narrators have similar bizarre experiences particularly as Capmeadow engages in something called The Expansion Project. The Project involves the Capmeadow campus literally expanding on its own – adding roads and housing and restaurants and even a museum. Many employees find that the easiest thing to do is just go with the flow and remain living there in corporate accommodation. This expansion is accompanied by a strange mist that has different psychological effects on the people who breathe it in. And that is before things get really weird.

As already noted, The Expansion Project is a take down of modern corporate culture – from CEO town halls to video conferences to security passes to the idea of office presence. But it comes at all of these things from such a surreal angle so its barbs are likely to land more squarely for those (and there are plenty of us) who have lived it than those who have not. But either way, The Expansion Project will both enthral and puzzle readers looking for something that takes the familiar and makes it compellingly bizarre.

The Expansion Project by Ben Pester

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