Dark Experience

Dark Experience is a collection of novellas by Li Hongwei, comprising three unrelated modern fables—"Dark Experience," "And the Reader Knows Not Where It Ends," and "Reality Consultant"—that all point toward the blurred boundary between fiction and reality. The title novella, "Dark Experience," follows young Zhang Li, who works at the "Bureau of Dark Experience": he screens suitable publishing outlines, supervises authors' creative work, and channels every creative impulse into humanity's shared "dark experience," so that literature may be corrected and regulated. As he rises in rank, he finds that he, his colleagues, and even the black cat in his home are turning white and transparent bit by bit; the explanation the work offers is that this job demands its practitioners be "pure." In "And the Reader Knows Not Where It Ends," book clubs have become a fashionable way of life, and everyone competes to discuss a novel called The List. A book critic unexpectedly receives an expanded sample edition sent by the author of The List, only to discover that the original edition of the book was never on the market—for the critic himself is a character invented by the author of The List. "Reality Consultant" turns "reality" into a business: a person's assets, emotions, symptoms, and circumstances can all be handed over to a "reality consultant" to manage and operate. A mother, on her deathbed, chooses to appear before her son in a perfect virtual image in order to settle a secret. With a Kafkaesque approach of "the more fictional, the more real," the three novellas peel back, layer by layer, the mutations of experience happening around us. The book is about 133,000 characters long.