The Collector – A frightening dystopian horror novel (Paperback)

Our summary description

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In a future where sorrow is treated as a fault to be erased, Lieutenant Dev Singh works as a recorder of other people’s grief. His role at the Bureau is to catalogue memories before minds are wiped clean, smoothing citizens into calmer, more efficient versions of themselves. The work demands distance, obedience, and silence.

Privately, Dev refuses to forget. He writes at night, holding onto small human moments that the state deems dangerous. A child’s laugh. A pause filled with light. The ache of love beginning. These fragments become an act of resistance, and a confession he barely allows himself to name.

When the Bureau discovers his secret, and recognises the same forbidden sadness within him, Dev is removed for treatment. The institution insists it knows how to heal him, how to make him useful again.

The Collector is a restrained, unsettling novel about memory and control, and about the quiet defiance of feeling in a world that fears it most.