This dark corporate satire will distract you from your own work woes

5 hours ago 4

By Eddie Hampson

July 16, 2025 — 5.54pm

FICTION
Stinkbug
Sinead Stubbins
Affirm Press, $34.99

Can wellness culture mix with the workplace? Don’t the two produce a weird water and oil liquid that can’t quite combine, no matter how cutting-edge the innovations? In her debut novel, Stinkbug, Sinéad Stubbins wittily highlights the many pitfalls of current trends, and in the process holds up a cracked mirror of horror as we recognise how corporate culture is invading individual privacy.

Edith is our anti-heroine. Swedish overlords are acquiring the marketing company where Edith – the worst kind of control freak who lives in habitual fear of the outstretched hands of her subordinates, her equals, and her superiors – has worked at for decades. All employees with jobs on the line are sent to a three-day luxury “work retreat” in the Australian bush where a sip of a mind-altering elixir will replace toxic negativity with toxic positivity. So much oil, so much water.

The approach of the team leaders escalates from a familiar wellness doctrine to group exercises in consensual slapping that get way out of hand and are madly funny.

Edith’s life is a shamble in every other respect, so she can’t cope with her job being on the line as well. Then there’s the fact that the retreat threatens to lay bare the very worst aspects of Edith. The crowning jewel of her self-destruction comes with the looming exposure of the secret that she had her (popular) former partner fired from the company.

Stubbins’ satire of corporate wellness culture is laugh-out-loud funny.

Poor Edith is something of a monster of bad faith but her paranoia and sneakiness are intimately familiar; they’re cartoon exaggerations of us all. All that deception, all those tangled webs.Stinkbug tickles the reader but then it starts to pinch; to squeeze and to claw at your fears.

What begins as workplace farce mutates into a corporate horror show as everyone’s salaries are revealed and suddenly, chillingly, “Edith’s colleagues [move] towards her … speaking in low voices, coming closer, gnashing their teeth and snarling things that she couldn’t catch.”

Then comes every office worker’s nightmare exchange.

“‘Are you simple?’ [Edith’s boss] said, his eyes squinting. We have access to your emails … to the instant messaging system. Do you really think that just because you write something in a chat box marked as private, it means we can’t see what you’re writing? We own that information … I knew you were lying to other people … I know that those same people who were listening to you complain about [work] were the losers in the other stories you were telling.”

There’s a dark and dreadful side to Stubbins’ comedy that makes us laugh in the face of an untrustworthy mirror. With nowhere else to turn, Edith throws herself head-first into the wacky wellness treatments on offer at the retreat. Everyone is in a trance, electing to share their deepest darkest memories and celebrating the trauma – “‘Yes!’ [The team leader] exclaimed. ‘Yes! Yes! Keep going!’” – until they’re all sweaty and have blood on their hands. “‘Yes!’ Edith yelled, nicely, positively ... She held up her hand and everyone yelled in delight as Edith’s blood started to flow down her wrist; it felt incredible, like she belonged to something.” It’s a caricature of wellness culture, a familiar image through a distorted lens.

Stubbins has written a book that is compellingly successful in its distorted reflection of a world that feels stranger by the day. It can stand comparison with Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers in its tripped-out nuttiness, and also with the far-out storylines of the three different seasons of The White Lotus.

This is a cool, deadly nightmare of a book, its dream logic an exact caricature of where we seem to be headed.

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