Craved sinister conformity and eroding identity in The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin? Let The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris unsettle you next.

If Levin's suburban cul-de-sac made you distrust manicured smiles, Harris transplants that dread into a publishing house where diversity initiatives mask something far more sinister. The same claustrophobic paranoia—is everyone complicit, or am I losing my mind?—now plays out in Slack channels and editorial meetings. Here, performative allyship becomes the new stepford uniformity, and a young editor's professional ambitions collide with forces determined to reshape her into someone more palatable, more manageable, more erased.

What begins as microaggressions and office politics metastasizes into full-blown speculative horror. The beauty products, the sudden personality shifts, the coworkers who insist everything's fine—Levin's playbook, sharpened for the corporate diversity-and-inclusion era.

Read it if you're ready to discover what happens when gatekeeping goes supernatural.