If you love Severance, you’ll probably love these 6 books, too

We waited three years for Severance’s second season, and somehow it’s already over. Hopefully the season 3 hiatus won’t be nearly as long, but I, for one, am already mourning my weekly dose of the Apple TV Plus series. 

I loved knowing that every week, I’d never be able to predict what was coming, and that I’d be faced with provocative questions about the nature of identity, how to survive within arbitrary systems of control, the ways those in power test the limits of technology and what people can endure, and, of course, what the hell happens in the goat room. No other show does it quite like them!

So, if you’re like me and already thinking about ways to fill time until Severance returns, sure, there are plenty of things you can watch, but there are also plenty of things to read, too. With cryptic, corkscrewy mysteries, poignant and comical workplace satires, and a byzantine horror masterpiece, these six books will help capture some of that Severance magic.

Supplemental reading

• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick if you’re looking for a proto-cyberpunk novel about fractured identity, paranoia, and the inability to trust your own reality.
• Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin if you’re looking for a story about the power of memory and the harm in erasing (and regaining) the most painful moments of your past.
• Hum by Helen Phillips if you’re looking for an anticapitalist story about one person’s fight for her family and humanity’s relationship with technology in a declining world.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke if you’re looking for a serpentine mystery about memory, self-reliance, and belonging.
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch if you’re looking for a beach-read thriller in which split identities clash across parallel universes.
• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa if you’re looking for a hypnotic fable about the horrors of forgetting and dangers of a totalitarian surveillance state.
• The Castle by Franz Kafka if you’re looking for a story about the meaninglessness of bureaucracy and human longing within alienating systems.