Performance Reviews

NOW AVAILABLE!

“Performance Reviews is a darkly comic satire of corporate life, where cubicles are prisons and every move is tracked. Follow a frustrated proofreader with dreams of writing, as he navigates absurd office rules, petty rivalries, and the soul-crushing C.H.E.C.K. system. Equal parts biting critique and laugh-out-loud humour, Jeff Cottrill’s latest novel explores ambition, risk, and the desperate human need for recognition—even in the most absurdly oppressive workplaces. Five-star dark laughs all round.”

– Kelly Van Nelson, bestselling author of The Pinstripe Prisoner and Punch & Judy

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“It’s nine o’clock on a weekday, and the line of the lobotomized shuffles in…”

Welcome to Appleton & Associates, Inc. a workplace so toxic, inhuman, and callous it destroys the lives of everyone it touches – where the façade of creativity hides an office ruled by quotas, drained by micro-managing, and monitored obsessively by Human Resources with a smile that feels more like a threat. Proofreaders Phil, Curt, and Jean try to keep their heads down, but in a company where ambition, fear, and loyalty collide, every routine performance review can turn into a weapon.

Following up on his 2022 debut Hate Story (Dragonfly Publishing), a scathing take on online public shaming, Cottrill brings biting satire to corporate culture in Performance Reviews. With sharp wit and unflinching detail, he shows how a toxic system erodes marriages, friendships, and sanity itself. Funny, chilling, and disturbingly plausible, Performance Reviews is a novel that takes the empty buzzwords of the office and reveals the cruelty hiding underneath.

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“Uncomfortably accurate, this pitch-perfect portrayal of corporate life leaves no stone unturned in examining and exposing the drudgery, the bullying and the bitter cost on personal relationships, as well as the drain on what it takes to survive, including, at times, the loss of who we are to ourselves. In the end, does The Man win? Read Performance Reviews to find out!”

– Lisa de Nikolits, author of Mad Dog and the Sea Dragon

“In his second novel, Jeff Cottrill takes the modern workplace to court, prosecutes it for crimes against the soul, and sentences it to life imprisonment in a can of whoop-ass.”

– Timothy Carter, author of Epoch and Evil?

“This is a pacey, gripping character-driven novel, where The Office meets Oedipus Rex. Cottrill draws on classic tragedy and even myth in some of his character studies – the trickster figure, for example, or the flawed hero – and the result is a bitter comedy, a tragedy in the purest sense of the word, and a wise understanding of corporate employment with all its own inevitabilities. By the time we reach the conclusion, we are drained by catharsis, pelted by irony, and deeply implicated in the choices and actions of the characters.”

– Dr. Amina Alyal, writer and lecturer at Leeds Trinity University