Beta Vulgaris

When Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, all she knows about harvesting sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) is that her paycheck will cover a few months' rent on their Brooklyn apartment. She'll try anything to escape the incessant debt collections calls--and chronic anxieties about her body and her relationship. But as the grueling graveyard shifts set in, Elise notices strange things: threatening texts, a mysterious rash, a string of disappearances from the workers' campsite, and snatches of a hypnotic voice coming from the beet pile itself. As crewmembers vanish, Elise obsesses over Tom's closeness with their charismatic coworker Cee and falls back on self-destructive patterns of disordered eating and dissociation. Against the horrors of her uncertain future, is the siren song of the beet pile almost . . . appealing? Biting and eerie, Beta Vulgaris harnesses an audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.