The fiction behind it

Sarah Perriam never stopped asking who the small print was for

Sarah Perriam is the fictional journalist at the centre of James B Wood’s Red Tape & Ruin series. She spends her time following paperwork, bills and the quiet bureaucracy that turns everyday life into a set of recurring obligations.

This publication takes its spirit from her. The subscriptions, cancellation mazes and direct debits documented here are real enough to annoy, and absurd enough to be worth reading about.

Red Tape & Ruin

The series

Follow fictional journalist Sarah Perriam through a world where paperwork has become a weapon and every form hides a further clause.

Techno-political fiction

Systems that anticipate

The novels imagine how recurring fees, locked-in platforms and automated enforcement grow out of ordinary administrative habit.

Dystopian satire

Dry, not doom

Each book keeps its scepticism sharp and its tone understated, treating the surveillance of daily life with wit rather than spectacle.

James B Wood writes about the way corporate bureaucracy and techno-political systems spill out of spreadsheets and terms of service into real homes. The subject is rarely a villain in a cape. It is a cancellation form, a renewal notice, a device that will not start until the account is current.

That is the reason the novels sit comfortably beside a publication about subscriptions. Both ask the same question: who actually benefits when ownership becomes a licence that must be renewed?