I’m watching a video about industrialized sugar beet production. These beets aren’t destined for dinner plates. They will instead be pulverized into sugar. A piler severs the beets’ leaves and stems, leaving them in green rows on the ground for a man-driven machine that rolls across the farm. It sucks the beets up, gathers them in the trunk, and churns them out into massive heaps. The beets don’t look like the cute bulbs or even the bloody red slices I expect. Rather, these beets could be mistaken for pointy potatoes. Harvesting a monocrop, I think, looks like tedious work. This is the scene that Margie Sarsfield returns to repeatedly in her debut novel Beta Vulgaris.

We join Elise, the novel’s protagonist, as she and her boyfriend Tom drive from Brooklyn to Minnesota during the Obama-Romney campaign season. They are scheduled to work the night shift in the North Star State for two weeks, harvesting sugar beets. Elise has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and $135 left in her bank account. The fortnight of shifts, she hopes, will pay off her credit card debt and float a month’s worth of rent. But this is a novel about Millennials in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and nothing goes quite as planned. As the work begins to strain Elise—her credit card company won’t stop calling her and is Tom eyeing one of their coworkers?—the beets begin to call to her. And soon her coworkers begin to disappear, one-by-one and then two-by-two.

When the couple first arrives at their campsite—home for the next two weeks—they befriend a group of misfits. Most are newbies working the harvest like Elise and Tom. Among their coworkers is Cee, to whom Elise is immediately attracted. Elise’s diverging romantic feelings are only one of her myriad anxieties, which percolate from the novel’s beginning. As much as Beta Vulgaris is a novel about class, it is also about the idiosyncratic anxieties—social, climate, body image—that are exacerbated by a lack of stability. When Elise begins to hear a voice from the beet pile which commands her to return the dirt, these anxieties reach a breaking point. Despite being largely set on a farm in a town called Eldritch, Beta Vulgaris is more a work of psychological horror than anything else. And it is light on the horror.

Dinging a book on the merits of its marketing may be considered unfair, though it is nearly as significant to a reader’s experience as the prose. In this case, I was drawn to a blurb from LitHub’s McKayla Coyle, who termed Beta Vulgaris “vegetable gothic.” My heart strummed! I don’t know what belongs to the canon of vegetable gothic except surely Bunnicula (1979-2006), but, as a Midwestern scholar of the Gothic, nothing appeals to me more. The marketing copy upholds this description: Elise notices “strange things,” receives “threatening phone calls,” gets a “mysterious rash,” and hears “ominous voices from the beet pile” that are also described as having the quality of a “siren song.” This combined with Tom’s disappearance, noted in the copy, indicates that something sinister will be uncovered. I was to be disappointed. Without giving too much away, readers of Strange Horizons should know that Beta Vulgaris might not fulfill your expectations of a horror novel.

But marketing is not solely at fault for Beta Vulgaris’s underperformance. True, the novel begins promisingly with a great hook. Sinister beets? Say no more. And some of Sarsfield’s details are off the charts: A Big Boy statue with blue glowing eyes is a distinctive and genuinely creepy image; Elise’s eating disorder often manifests as imagining foods as grotesque alternatives, like tater tots that have the “mouthfeel of cockroaches” (p. 213); working the piler has a disturbingly erotic quality. Most of all, however, Sarsfield creates a character in Elise who is infuriatingly familiar and not terribly likable but still empathetic—at least, for some of the novel.

Suffering under repetition, however, Beta Vulgaris ultimately takes the air out of its own potential. Sarsfield doesn’t appropriately balance enough compelling action with Elise’s tailspin, which becomes monotonous rather than climactic. At the risk of sounding callous, it is also at times simply annoying. Often, the trouble is not with the content so much as with Sarsfield’s repetitive prose. In a moment that is typical of Elise’s inner monologue, Tom waves her over to where he and Cee sit together:

As though Elise needed an invitation to sit down with her own fucking boyfriend at their own fucking campsite. Did Elise hate Cee, actually? It was unfair that Cee got to be everything Elise had ever wanted to be. No, Cee was an orphan. Elise was the lucky one. Elise’s problems were her own fault. (p. 123)

Later, considering her coworker, Elise wonders, “Were they friends, though? Were they, really? Did Eric pity her? Did Eric hate her? Was Elise angry, or was she having a panic attack?” (p. 210). Shortly after, Elise feels that she “hated everything she saw out there [at the camp]” (p. 210). Much of the narrative follows this pattern in which self-defeat and second-guessing are on the heels of almost any interaction Elise has.

While many audiences have a healthy appetite for unlikable, or “unhinged,” women (which has its own extensive GoodReads shelf), Elise emerges only as kind of a dud, a bummer to hang out with. Her main action, in fact, is avoidance. As her troubles increase, she fantasizes about “packing up and leaving, starting fresh someplace where no one’s current perception of Elise could be tainted by things her previous selves had said or done” (p. 126). This passage endears the reader to Elise; who among us hasn’t wanted to start over? It’s a seductive thought. The trouble is that she never does. Nor does she do much else. Again and again, Elise refuses to act. I believe that Sarsfield is adept enough as a writer to intend this characterization and that she intends for it to say something about the dire straits many working-class Americans find themselves in. Unlike some of the characters with generational wealth, Elise has few options. It nevertheless results in question-riddled paragraphs and too few answers, a problem Beta Vulgaris exhibits, too, on a structural level.

Indeed, the novel fumbles seriously halfway through. Although things technically do happen in the second half of the novel (people go missing, after all), these moments have little force and the emphasis is instead on Elise’s malaise. The sinister details that are so enticing early in the novel stagnate as it becomes increasingly clear that Beta Vulgaris wants to be a character study embroiled in a strange plot, but that its two tracks fail to satisfyingly cohere.

As the world may soon topple into a global recession, a novel about those left behind during the last American financial crisis seems particularly potent. Beta Vulgaris, however, is a sluggish read with a largely passive protagonist. Perhaps passivity is the point but at times reading it was as tedious as watching beets being beaten into sugar.