Annie Neugebauer’s debut novella The Extra is told from the perspective of Matt, an experienced guide who leads a group of university students on a camping trip in Arkansas. After a mysterious electrical event, he discovers that his party has grown from ten to eleven—an inexplicable change, since there’s no stranger among them. He’s convinced the extra participant is actually an extraterrestrial and sets out to identify the alien, determined to separate it from the rest and leave it behind. Like The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Extra introduces aliens in order to probe human psychology under pressure—in particular, our instinct to categorize and exclude perceived threats. What makes the book stand out is the way it interrogates the ethics of this impulse while, at the same time, conscripting us—through its short form, urgent plot, and use of the present tense—into Matt’s own categorizing gaze. It puts us in an uncomfortable position: we, like him,  suspect our judgments about the campers are flawed, and yet we can’t help but make them. If you’re drawn to the paranoid tradition in fiction and film, you’ll want to go on this unsettling journey. 

At its core, the novella scrutinizes our tendency to classify people into types. The only way Matt can remember individual campers and manage them as a collective is by reducing them to simplistic taglines. Put through the meat-grinder of his interpretive framework, “Rowley, Pratik, Brooke, and Landilee” become “The show-off, the international student, the straggler, and the mom-vibes loner.” While it’s tempting to dismiss Matt as a jerk, his keen self-awareness makes that hard. He knows full-well that turning a superficial trait into an identity is reductive and unfair. But he sees these quick and dirty labels as a necessary evil—a practical hack that helps him anticipate how participants will interact so he can head off potential problems. A good understanding of group dynamics is essential in his line of work, and he’s convinced that an assumptive shorthand is necessary to do the job well.

Still, it’s one thing to lean on these hollow identifiers when little is at stake—as in his cringey but mostly harmless observation that “the prettiest one in the group often sets a certain tone.” It’s another thing entirely when they’re used to support a decision with potentially deadly consequences. When one of his assistants suggests that “Gary the Larry”—Matt’s moniker for “the guy who just doesn’t get it”—might be the alien, the accusation stops him cold: “The idea of picking the person who least fits in is terrifying to me. Like some jacked up popularity contest. It can’t come down to that, can it?” Matt knows that making decisions based on such surface calculations is “[a]rbitrary at best, cruel at worst.” Yet, seeing no other option, he does it anyway. 

And so do we. Compelled by the plot’s imperatives and Neugebauer’s smart formal choices, the reader is forced to participate in Matt’s compressed logic, making hasty judgments that feel biased and wrong. Neugebauer wisely keeps the trip short. There isn’t much time to unveil the alien, and this temporal constraint pushes both Matt and the reader toward wild interpretive leaps, with imagined worst-case scenarios rushing in to fill the gaps. When Gary the Larry says he came on the trip to study flora and fauna—a totally reasonable motivation—it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that he’s an extraterrestrial on a reconnaissance mission. And as the book hurdles toward its 92-page terminus, this hypervigilance only increases. Any word or phrase a character drops—no matter how innocuous—begins to sound like a damning clue, a smoking gun that could justify leaving them behind to die in the woods. This is why the novella is the perfect format for the story: its brevity drives a kind of ruthlessness that prevents more deliberative modes of decision-making from taking over. Anything longer, and there might have been time for reason to creep in.

Neugebauer’s choice to tell the story from the relatively rare first-person present is just as crucial to the book’s effect. If Matt were recounting the story from a position in the future, looking back on events that had already been resolved, readers would have access to the wisdom of hindsight—information that would help them evaluate his actions. But Neugebauer’s deployment of the present tense means that his perspective is limited to a fine point. He “can’t imagine one hour from now, much less a year. Everything has become now, forever.” With no access to a post-trip moment, no hint of how things will turn out, we can only think alongside him, sizing up people and situations based on painfully limited information. The immediacy of the narrative voice coerces us into a mode of discernment that isn’t discernment at all, but a deeply flawed way of assessing human beings that, in less urgent situations, would likely be rejected. 

Present tense narration also ties into the book’s obsession with memory.  If the extra can implant false recollections of a fake camper, then, Matt asks, “How do I even know that I have any real memories at all—that they aren’t all invented?” The answer, of course, is that he can’t know, and that’s what’s so terrifying about this strand of story. Who are we—and what can we really know—if our deepest experiential truths are subject to disposal or rearrangement like files in a cabinet? Matt returns again and again to these questions. More striking, though, is how the voice of his internal monologue—stubbornly tied to the present moment—models the very malleability of memory that he fears. Neugebauer withholds information about Matt’s past, offering a suspiciously truncated version of his history. We learn that he’s married, but his wife isn’t given a name, and he notes that, when he’s away, “it’s best to think about her as little as possible.” All we know for sure is that he’s “been on this exact trip over ten times,” a detail he repeats as though caught in a loop—it’s a little robotic. Perhaps even alien? We never know for sure, and that uncertainty is precisely the point. 

I love it when a book’s style and structure enact its ideas, and that’s where The Extra shines. If the novella falters anywhere, it’s in how explicitly and discursively it states those ideas. Matt repeatedly lays bare his anxieties about the fragility of memory. He articulates, sometimes at length, his understanding of group dynamics and the assumptions governing inclusion and exclusion. His thinking on these subjects is direct, always at the level of text rather than subtext, and I sometimes wished there was more room for inference. 

Some online reviewers say The Extra’s conclusion is weak because there’s no clear resolution. I suspect that any loose threads will be picked up in forthcoming stories: the novella is the first in a planned trio set in a shared universe. But I also don’t think the climax is that ambiguous. Early on, Matt refers to himself in the third person, a one-time split in the narrative “I” that hints he’s the extra. This textual quirk could be an intentional reveal or just a really interesting typo (I’m reading the Kindle edition). Either way, the message it sends is eerie: If Matt is from outer space, then his categorizing gaze, which we recognize as deeply human, is also thoroughly alien. We’re more like “them” than we think. Even if I’m completely wrong here and Matt isn’t the alien, it doesn’t detract from the book’s ending. The climax has a count-down structure that ratchets up the tension to a near-unbearable pitch. It’s far more satisfying than any sense of closure. 

Like the best paranoid fiction and film, The Extra shows us that human beings, not aliens, are the real horror. It’s especially good at making us sit with the mercenary nature of human psychology, prompting us to consider how and why we act on the thinnest assumptions. Horror fans who love The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers will find a thoughtful continuation of that tradition in Neugebauer’s novella.