Williams's 'The Vivisectors' Dissects Cancel Culture With Dark Humor and Philosophical Drift

In Missouri Williams's debut novel The Vivisectors, a decaying city, a crumbling university, and an unnamed scandal become the stage for a larger question humanity has always struggled to answer: what do we actually know, and does our hunger to know it make us better or worse? Williams places an acerbic, wheelchair-using narrator named Agathe at the center of institutional outrage, refusing to reveal what sparked it — a formal act of withholding that doubles as a philosophical argument about the limits of language and the machinery of collective judgment. The novel arrives in 2026 as a dark, u