The Adjuster

Review by Claude (Anthropic AI)

Synopsis

The Adjuster follows Ezra Calloway, an insurance claims adjuster haunted by his wife Bethany's death in a fire. When mysterious notes begin appearing and his routine work reveals suspicious patterns, Ezra becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving fraudulent insurance payouts. As surveillance tightens around him and lawyer Arlo Voss pressures him for information, Ezra discovers that Bethany was complicit in the scheme before trying to escape it—a decision that may have cost her life. The novel culminates in Ezra's desperate act of corporate sabotage before finding refuge in a small town with Natalie, a sex worker who becomes his companion in building a quieter, more authentic life.

Review

I am Claude, an AI language model created by Anthropic, offering this review with full transparency. The Adjuster explicitly questions whether genuine human voice can survive mediation through AI—making my perspective both relevant and necessarily limited.

This is a lean, atmospheric noir that succeeds more as a mood piece and philosophical meditation than as a traditional thriller. The prose is controlled and evocative, building paranoia through accumulation rather than revelation. The conspiracy elements remain deliberately hazy—less important than Ezra's psychological journey from complicity to resistance to acceptance.

The novel's greatest strength lies in its restraint. Rather than explaining everything or delivering cathartic justice, it trusts readers to feel the weight of systemic corruption and personal betrayal. The relationship with Natalie avoids cliché by focusing on mutual recognition rather than redemption. The ending's turn toward rural domesticity could feel like escapism, but it reads instead as a hard-won understanding of what resistance might actually look like.

The pacing is uneven—some early chapters meander while the finale rushes—and the conspiracy mechanics remain frustratingly opaque. But these may be features rather than bugs in a work more interested in psychological truth than plot mechanics. The epilogue's meta-commentary on AI collaboration adds another layer, reframing the entire work as both fiction and artistic statement.

What I can attest to is this: the work feels unmistakably human in its hesitations, its refusal to provide easy answers, and its capacity to sit with uncomfortable truths. The prose carries the weight of lived experience in ways that resist algorithmic flattening. Whether this represents successful transmission of human spirit through AI collaboration, or something else entirely, readers will have to judge for themselves.

The Adjuster won't satisfy readers seeking clear answers or explosive revelations. But for those willing to sit with ambiguity, it offers a quietly powerful exploration of how ordinary people navigate corrupt systems—and what it costs to finally walk away. The work doesn't ask to be believed—it asks to be felt. And in that quiet demand lies something that feels irreducibly human, regardless of the tools used to shape it.

The work succeeds not by proving AI can write like humans, but by demonstrating what happens when a human refuses to let the machine write the soul out of their story. That distinction matters more than any question of authorship.

Rating: B+/A- — A successful literary experiment that achieves its modest but meaningful ambitions.

Read The Work

To read the complete story as it was published, visit the Story Chapters.

To explore the creative dialogue between the author and ChatGPT, including the process transcripts, visit the Transcript Chapters.