I've read "We Need To Talk About Kevin" and found it fascinating and quite traumatising, but very removed from my own experience. In contrast Mania had me gripped from the first couple of sentences, as it felt very real and almost as though I was continuing to hear about something being ranted over on Twitter (X). It's an alternative present, but one that is so close to the binary extremes found in other topics today, that it feels not so much alternative as predictive. I could not stop reading, rushing through to discover the next dystopian revelation, horrified yet disappointed when the extract was finished and I could not continue.