Doretta Lau, known for her breakout short story collection debut, How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?, is back with her debut novel. Coming on October 14, 2026 from House of Anasi, We Are Underlings is about a grieving young marketing employee at a macabre theme park devoted to death and the afterlife who must help program her mysteriously deceased boss’s reanimated corpse to keep the park’s grand opening on schedule, forcing her to navigate corporate absurdity, workplace necromancy, and a string of suspicious deaths among her coworkers.
The book is available for pre-order now.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover designed by Alysia Shewchuk below, along with a Q&A with Lau about how it was created.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
One of my friends has synesthesia and sees colours when she reads. She told me my writing appears neon, and I loved this—I imagined vivid hues. My words are alive! As I was finishing the last chapters of the book, I saw the title in neon lights: We Are Underlings. The novel is set in Hong Kong, a city famous for this type of signage. But when the time came, I didn’t ask for these visuals because most of the novel’s action takes place indoors, in work spaces, and the narrative is told in first person.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
My editor, Shirarose Wilensky, sent me a questionnaire to share with the team. I had big, expensive dreams: could we possibly use art by Banksy created for the installation Dismaland? I also went through Xiaohongshu and found these incredible collages posted by a bookstore in China. I’m a huge fan of Sonja Ahlers’ work, and had wondered if we could bring her onboard to work on something. I like to pretend I’m a minimalist, but really I’m a maximalist to the extreme and I sent in some very chaotic requests because I wanted it all.
The team came back to me with five possible covers and that was a great jumping off point to distill all the ideas we had. Everyone was very open to discussing how we could best express the story in a single visual moment. I imagined the kind of reader who might be sitting on public transit immersed in my book. I rethought a bit and my friend M. Paramita Lin pulled a series of posters for indie rock shows for me to reference. I asked my editor if we could try a screen print aesthetic with an anatomical heart. A little DIY whimsy applied to science. Then the designer, Alysia Shewchuk, performed sorcery.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It was unexpected and amazing—I was waiting for the team to decide between two fantastic covers I had approved from the second round. When Shirarose emailed me with the final one, I had a migraine. Still, I opened the file and was stunned: Alysia had created the perfect cover. The typeface is truly incredible, somehow encapsulating comedy and horror at the same time.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The cover encapsulates the novel’s vibe really well: the juxtaposition of the anatomical heart on the dark background with the jaunty typeface gives a sense of how a serious topic like mortality can be approached with comedy. The protagonist, Zita Chang, works at a theme park devoted to dying, death, and the afterlife that’s slated to open to the public in ten weeks. When the Executive Director of the company dies, instead of reporting it to the authorities, the team decides to reanimate the dead body to keep everything on track. I was inspired by Weekend at Bernie’s, George Saunders’s short stories, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, and Johnnie To’s filmography. (When I think about it, many of To’s movies are about workplaces and organizations, even though they’re not set within traditional office spaces.) The central question of We Are Underlings is really about what it means to live a life and be a person.