We Are Watching Eliza Bright
Graduate '16 - Creative Writing at The New School
Grand Central Publishing (an imprint of Hachette), 2021
In this thrilling story of survival and anger, a woman has her whole life turned upside down after speaking out against workplace hostility–and inadvertently becomes the leader of a cultural movement.
Eliza Bright is living the dream as an elite video game coder at Fancy Dog Games, the first woman to ascend that high in the ranks—and some people want to make sure she’s the last. To her friends, Eliza Bright is a brilliant, self-taught coder bravely calling out the misogyny that pervades her workplace and industry. To the men who see her very presence as a threat, Eliza Bright is a woman who needs to be destroyed to protect the game they love.
When Eliza’s report of workplace harassment is quickly dismissed, she’s forced to take her frustrations to a journalist who blasts her story across the internet. She’s fired and doxxed, and becomes a rallying figure for women everywhere. But she’s also enraged the beast comprised of online male gamers—their unreliable chorus narrates our story. Soon, Eliza is in the cross-hairs of the gaming community, threatened and stalked as they monitor her every move online and across New York City.
As the violent power of the angry male collective descends upon everyone in Eliza’s life, it becomes increasingly difficult to know who to trust, even when she’s eventually taken in and protected by an under-the-radar Collective known as the Sixsterhood. The violence moves from cyberspace to the real world, thanks to a vicious male super-fan known only as The Inspectre, determined to exact his revenge on behalf of men everywhere. We watch alongside the Sixsterhood and subreddit keyboard warriors as this dramatic cat-and-mouse game plays out to its violent and inevitable conclusion in this thrilling story of resilience and survival.
“Fiendishly clever, wildly engrossing, and both dark and timely, We Are Watching Eliza Bright is unlike anything I’ve read before. Osworth is a major talent with narrative tricks to spare. I devoured this book.”
—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
“We Are Watching Eliza Bright is a novel that takes on our techy zeitgeist at its silicon core. It’s is a novel vital for our time. Fun and smart, but always deeply insightful.”
—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning
“This brilliantly imagined novel is a first-rate thriller, but it is also a philosophically astute, deeply funny, and generous book that defies categories in all the best ways.”
—Luis Jaramillo, author of The Doctor’s Wife