Review: Chloe Benjamin's Under Story plays with reversed time but strains credibility

American author Chloe Benjamin's third novel, Under Story, introduces the concept of a "duoverse" — a parallel world where life unfolds in reverse compared to ours. There, people emerge from the ground as elderly beings with fresh brains, grow progressively younger, and eventually disappear back into their mothers' wombs.

The novel follows a couple, Laurel and Eli, grieving the death of their son Silas, who travel to this alternate world through a portal beneath Antarctic ice in hopes of bringing him back. Eli is a physicist and Laurel a mycologist, and both characters offer extensive explanations of how this backwards world functions, grounded in the concept of entropy.

The Guardian review compares the book to earlier works exploring reversed time, such as Ian McEwan's The Cockroach, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, and F Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. However, unlike those shorter, sharper works, Benjamin's novel runs to roughly 500 pages, and the reviewer argues the length undermines the premise — the longer the characters remain in this world, the more contrived it feels.

The critic also points to inconsistency in which bodily functions the author chooses to reverse and which she leaves unchanged, suggesting the novel wants the effects of a backwards world without fully committing to its consequences. Compared with Benjamin's previous novel, The Immortalists (2018), where ambiguity drove the story's appeal, Under Story is said to over-explain its premise, ultimately undermining the mystery that might otherwise have engaged readers.