‘Broken Country’ by Clare Leslie Hall follows two lost lovers

Author of Detransition, Baby found success and pushback she never anticipated and now returns with a provocative collection of stories

Author Torrey Peters’ mind has imagined everything from a future virus that turns everyone trans to a crossdressing fetishist in a poreless silicone suit, but the premise of her new novel, Stag Dance, sounded too bizarre even for her. “If I hadn’t read it in a book I wouldn’t have believed it,” she told me during a lengthy conversation about her life and work. “It’s so over the top. It’s literally an upside down triangle. That’s a little too on the nose.”

The triangle Peters refers to is one that is made out of fabric, and that loggers in the early part of the last century used to affix to their crotches in order to denote that they had changed their sex to female for the purposes of dances held deep in the wilderness. This is a fact that Peters uncovered while reading original texts about logging culture while developing the unique lexicon that she employs to write the titular novel. One of these “stag dances” forms the basis of Peters’ story, a remarkable feat of high modernism that channels the ethos of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian into the story of a lumberjack experiencing a remarkable gender transition.

Geoffrey Rush’s retired judge is terrorised by Lithgow’s therapy puppet-wielding fellow resident in this claustrophobic tale of elder-on-elder abuse

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end. It’s a movie about bullying and elder abuse – more specifically, elder-on-elder abuse – and it is always most chilling when it sticks to the realist constraints of what could actually happen.

The locale is an un-luxurious residential care facility where a retired judge is now astonished to find himself; this is Stefan Mortensen, played by Geoffrey Rush, who succumbed to a catastrophic stroke while passing judgment from the bench. He is a cantankerous and high-handed man, furious to be in this demeaning place and who, like many there, assures himself it isn’t for long. Mortensen has to share a room with Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby star whose career fizzled out. These men are terrorised by long-term patient Dave Crealy, played with true hideousness by John Lithgow, a racist bully who convinces the care staff he is a gentle, harmless soul by exaggerating his mental and physical decay, but tyrannises patients behind officialdom’s back with his therapy hand puppet named Jenny Pen, making the bewildered and terrified patients submit to her “rule”.

The Women’s Prize-nominated author Torrey Peters speaks to Hannah Ewens about horny lumberjacks, creating work for a dark political future in the US and why she won’t stop writing from the trans female perspective

A doctor’s brilliant study of the dangers of overdiagnosis, from ADHD to long Covid

We swim in oceans of quackery. The media is flooded with misinformation about health and pseudo-diagnoses based on vibes rather than evidence. Books awash with error and supposition swamp our charts, penned by people uniquely unqualified to write them. Our ears are filled with popular podcasts claiming health benefits but really just peddling unregulated dietary supplements. And Robert Kennedy Jr, a man who has spent a lifetime spewing antivaccine jibber-jabber, is now US secretary of health. Vaccination is arguably the most successful health intervention in history (with the possible exception of sanitation), and now more than ever we should be basking in the fact that a global pandemic was brought to a close by safe and effective vaccines.

But here’s the conundrum: medical diagnoses are on the rise across the board, in many cases dramatically, and this is fuel for the medical disinformation industry. The most obvious example is autism, the incidence of which has shot up in a couple of decades, correlated with, but not caused by, an increase in vaccination. Cancer diagnoses are also up. A lot more people seem to have ADHD these days, which was barely around when I was at school. And millions now endure long Covid, a disease with a bucket of symptoms that did not exist at all five years ago.

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s community in rural Maine is not always welcoming to trans women. She deals with the hostility by capturing the local area’s beauty