What unites Jordan Peele’s Us, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (remade into a Hulu series), and the most recently viral Severance? We might call this a new genre: Labor-as-Horror, given rise, perhaps, by how much “labor” has been in the headlines. There are varying interpretations: It can be a horrible thing (i.e. migrant or child labor); it can be a necessary thing under horrible attack (i.e. Trump’s labor cuts; AI’s replacement of humans); or it can itself be “horror” (i.e. Severance as an indictment of American work culture). “Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work.

What if, in fact, labor is a horror? Might the uncomfortable be a euphemism for the horrific? And might the fractures be bellwethers of actual collapse—of society, or safety, or everything we think we know? Or, perhaps, are we already living in that collapse?

In 2024, shortly before the US collapsed into its own panic of federal layoffs, job cuts, and halted funding—what CNN called a labor “bloodbath”—two novels were translated into English. Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean and Michele Mari’s Verdigris offer Chilean and Italian examples of Labor-as-Horror. And no wonder, set as they are in modern-day Santiago and 1969’s Nasca, respectively. More specifically, Clean and Verdigris are set in the states of Chile and Italy after the collapse of their fascist governments.

As their characters move through their everyday work, this history of fascism is simply fact, air, breath. Clean centers around the testimony of the housemaid Estela, assumed to be a murderer, while Verdigris is about the declining memory of the old groundskeeper “Felice: a true monster.” It is within the details of Estela and Felice’s work—as domestic workers—that the horror emerges: “Stiff, forced smile[s] which are really ‘grimace[s] of terror,’” a laundry of “shirts with bloodstains,” the “mass slaughter” of slugs in the garden, and lettuce heads with “voices chattering in French.”

The novels move toward revelations of death, destruction, and injustices obscured. In this way, the features of their work become structural and emotional fractures, and these fractures become horrific reflections of the persisting “social fissures” of the Pinochet and Mussolini regimes. For Estela and Felice—as for Chile and Italy—fascism is in the past. And yet its horrors endure.

Clean is narrated by a housemaid, Estela; throughout the novel, she is being interrogated for the death of her employer’s daughter. It’s written in choppy, beguiling prose, akin to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and mirroring Scheherazade’s storytelling in Arabian Nights. Estela’s narration is filled with macabre reflections on life and death, imbued with visceral descriptions of bodily or emotional violation and, always, dread.

One gets the feeling that Estela’s life is on the line: She wants to tell a good story; she wants to say something meaningful about death, society, and the family that employed her; she wants to be listened to; and she keeps asking, “Can you hear me?” Estela states at the beginning of the novel, “I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you’re going to let me out of here.” But this promise, by the novel’s end, collapses. “Hello?” Estela asks after she has finished her story. “I’m in here. The door’s still locked.”

The entire project of Clean is, in fact, a rumination on collapse. The novel begins with an epigraph from Albert Camus’s The Fall, and Estela’s recounting ends with a rock being thrown into the air. She laments, “I didn’t hear it fall.”

For the entirety of the novel, readers are likewise waiting for the moment to “drop”—for the little girl, Julia, to die. Although written like a mystery, Clean holds no surprises, only the anxious and uncomfortable fractures that crop up in Estela’s daily, monotonous work: the hiding of a stray dog, who Estela is later forced to kill; Julia’s father’s strange confession one night, which Estela is forced to listen to; Julia’s mother, toasting “cheers” to her guests immediately after mistreating Estela. These events don’t serve a specific plot, as much as they build malaise and the terrifying realization that we are all trapped, alongside Estela, in the story, the interrogation room, and the social system of labor.

Indeed, if there is any surprise in Clean at all, it is that neither the “how” nor the “why” of Julia’s death—the entire reason for Estela’s confession—are ever fully revealed. “What did the cause matter?” Estela asks. The point is the collapse. (Of safety, the promise of freedom, and the previous conviction that we might “get used to life there.”) “The damage was already done,” Estela says, “It’s important you understand. Spilled blood can’t return to its source. Just as a lifeless body will eventually sink underwater. Just as the crack that opened up that day would be impossible to mend.”

This impossibility might have been top of mind for Trabucco Zerán, who belongs to “a generation of writers who were children during the Pinochet era but largely came of age after the democratic transition,” explains Caroline A. Miranda. “Even as they have tasted political freedom, the legacy of the dictatorship has followed them into adulthood: the missing who never returned, as well as an economic system and a constitution molded by the military regime that is still used to govern the country.” How, then, could one not connect Estela’s warning to Chile’s fascist past?

It is a distinctive and perhaps incriminating time, then, for Trabucco Zerán’s Clean to come to English-speaking audiences, and especially to the United States, where fascism is on the rise. There are obvious resonances between Pinochet and Trump: their carefully constructed legal immunity; their use of propaganda and conspiracy; their refusal to accept any election results not in their favor.

Most blatantly, Trump is now echoing Pinochet’s “disappearings”: the one-thousand-plus people who Pinochet’s dictatorship kidnapped and killed, leaving no record of their fate. Now, only two years after Chile began uncovering what it could of these disappeared people, the US government kidnapped and disappeared a green-card holder, pro-Palestinian organizer and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil’s case was the first out of a series of many attempts to deport, detain, and disappear not only pro-Palestinian activists but also migrants, dissenters, and people of color. The use of the word “disappear” as a verb with a passive object is vital: not just “Khalil disappeared” but “the Trump administration disappeared Khalil,” or “Khalil was disappeared (by the government).” Khalil is turned into the passive object that is disappeared, rather than the sentence’s subject. He is stripped of grammatical agency, just as he is stripped of his political agency and legal rights. The horror, of course, is that what happens merely grammatically is, then, what happens in real life.

This use of “disappear” is often credited to Pinochet and threatens not just death or detainment but the literal quashing of one’s existence, voice, and memory. It is consequential and oppressive: an act of terror. In Chile (and in Spanish) it identifies victims of the Pinochet regime, known as “Los Desaparecidos” (The Disappeared). And in Clean, it is the apparatus upon which the novel’s thriller/horror element depends. Estela is afraid of disappearing. “Can you hear me?” she asks in the second sentence of the novel. “Can you hear me?” she asks again in the second-to-last sentence.

Estela is constantly concerned with disappearance: She is haunted by the concept of being forgotten, erased, and, indeed, “disappeared” in the passive form. When she is ordered to wash a dress, Estela notes that it “was so soft that at any moment it seemed it might disappear, and I with it.” When asked to clean the fallen figs from the yard, Estela remarks, “I cleaned until every last trace of death had disappeared. The tree would never recover, it had found its cause. After a few months they cut it down.” When Estela muses about the child Julia’s death, she says, “Of course the girl wouldn’t remember me. But maybe, had she lived, she’d have remembered my hands.” And when she thinks of herself and her past, Estela confesses, “It’s a strange coincidence, because it’s like my childhood memories all mounted up until my seventh birthday and then, poof, disappeared.”

Estela’s fear of disappearance is the reason she is invested in her storytelling, the reason she is haunted by Julia’s death, and the reason she cannot forget her own mother. The mundanities of her work threaten violence. She notices bloodstains in her employers’ dental guards, laundered shirts, and chewed fingernails. She sees death in the trees, the box of rat poison, the dustbin. She shoots a dog between its eyes. How is it that something can suddenly, “poof, [be] disappeared,” even oneself?

Clean ends with three questions: “Hello? Can you hear me? Is anybody there?”

The following white space, marking the end of the novel, marks also Estela’s final disappearance. This move is foreshadowed in all the preceding chapters, themselves split up into small written chunks and divided by tense, white space. These breaks are themselves disappearances—time jumps, words unspoken, unvoiced grievances—over and over again. That is, until the very last one, in which Estela is vanished.

Such disappearances are “places like the hidden storage room behind the dismantled bed at the side of the hayloft, places like the rich earth that lay under the lawn,” explains Michele Mari in his gothic horror novel Verdigris. “In both cases,” he writes, “these places and memories housed bodies: was it possible that this was all the past granted us, dead people or ghosts? The executed or the disappeared?” Mari’s characters—much like Trabucco Zerán’s—live in the ruins of a collapse they have yet to recognize, or, perhaps, even remember. Indeed, disappearance in Verdigris is directly tied to memory, and in particular the deteriorating memory of Felice, the delirious groundskeeper of a northern Italian estate.

In the summer of 1969, Felice strikes an unlikely friendship with his employer’s grandson, the 13-year-old Michelino. Michelino is entranced by Felice’s Otherness: his “lumpy and spongelike nose,” his rural dialect (which itself “seems to present a break from reality,” as Brian Robert Moore writes in his translator’s note), and, most of all, the fact that Felice’s memories are “disappearing at a devastating rate, because for every erasure that he noticed there must have been many others that, by the very virtue of the memory having vanished, left no sign and inspired no suspicion.”

In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppression, and even the tyrannies of fascism.

Michelino and Felice’s friendship is precarious, and readers are unsure who might hurt the other. Felice is older, menacing, physically grotesque, with a mysterious history; but Michelino is smart and a member of the social elite, indeed the grandson of Felice’s employer. Their friendship is not only unlikely but laden itself with the unease of the horror genre. It is also reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein’s relationship to his monster. Throughout the novel, indeed, Michelino refers to Felice as his “monster,” and he extracts a frightening glee from this relationship. “While I felt disheartened by the impossibility of helping [Felice] to put his unsettled mind back in order,” Michelino confesses, “there now crept in the joy of being able to confirm that my monster truly was a monster.”

Michelino makes it his mission to recover the memory of “ugly,” “monstrous,” “poor” Felice. He quizzes his grandfather’s groundskeeper on facts, interviews him about his past, and devises a game of mnemonic devices (“fleece” for “Felice,” “NASCAR” for the town “Nasca,” et cetera). But what begins as an assumption of a biological disorder—“senile dementia,” Michelino suspects—has more sinister roots.

In fact, Felice is traumatized by his past, and in particular, the historical violences brought on by a fascist state. He was abandoned as a child and a witness to murder. He does not have a last name. The historical records do not account for his employment at the summer estate: “The local officials at the time made a clean sweep of the preexisting documentation.” And Felice’s memory, Verdigris insinuates, is overwritten by further trauma, such that he is constantly “in contact with something frightening and unhuman … with the dead, essentially.” In this way, the novel draws direct conclusions between oppressive political systems and the act of disappearing memories, histories, and people.

“And what about no one knowing who owned this house before the Fascist era? Do things like that happen too?” Michelino asks his grandfather.

“They can happen,” his grandfather responds.

“And a Fascist prefect randomly making up a new name for a municipality, that can happen too, and with not a single inhabitant remembering the previous name?”

“That’s life, tout passe…”

Michelino is horrified by his grandfather’s shrugging acceptance of historical revisionism: “The same old crap they teach you in school to get the better of you,” he exclaims. “Everything flows and nothing stays, you convinced yourself that things were a certain way when, upsy-daisy, they’ve changed.”

This collapse is the horror in Verdigris, just as it is in Clean. Michelino goes on to discover wine bottles filled with blood, hidden barrels of meat-eating slugs, and the skeletal remains of Nazi soldiers: all hidden in his grandparents’ otherwise beautiful estate. “Why did the people who knew keep quiet?” Michelino asks. And why did Felice continue to “liv[e] permanently among the house’s mysteries … sleep[ing] in his little room, work[ing] in our garden and orchard”?

The question is similar to the ones Estela poses:

By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. … Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories, in the shops on the other side of this wall? I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals—open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth—each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life.

Both Clean and Verdigris ask us what we would do in the face of collapse. What we would do if we lived in “a place where we city dwellers … slowly yet meticulously progressed toward its own destruction”?

In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppression, and even the tyrannies of fascism. The ease with which we can continue in our respective daily tasks is one of the most obvious and horrendous ways we surrender our own freedom, agency, and remembrance.

What would we do in the face of an active disappearance—of people, memory, history? Would we keep quiet? Would we allow the mechanical repetition of labor, silence, or routine to pacify us? What would we do, if we were to be in that place?

As Anna Aslanyan writes, Verdigris can be read as a “a commentary on collective amnesia, a condition affecting not just contemporary Italy, where fascism is becoming a real threat again, but also societies all over the globe”—especially in the United States, which just welcomed the novel’s English translation. The same concern with amnesia, of course, can be found in Clean.

“From now on you can no longer say that you didn’t know,” Estela tells us, before she disappears forever. “That you didn’t hear or see. That you were oblivious to the truth, to reality.”

This is the double horror of both novels. We live in that place now.