I desperately want to make jokes about this novel, because it is so chilling and disturbing that my psyche can’t take it in. (No more dystopia for me until the pandemic is over.) East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin is a production assistant on the movie is his novel, and his particular assignment is chauffeuring actor (and former child star) Cassidy Carter to and from the L.A. film set. The California they inhabit is a hellscape of the not-too-distant future: the place has literally run out of water, which has been replaced by a chemically engineered substitute, WAT-R. Meanwhile, wildfires rage and residents are becoming strangely vague, then, wordless, then catatonic. Cassidy and Patrick improbably team up, in an effort to make sense of the changes *and* what’s happening to their film. Petty individual concerns are subsumed in the disaster that is every day life, and Patrick’s wife—back in upstate NY at an Earthbridge commune designed to help people deal with their climate change grief and anxiety—begins to look like the prescient one. No happy ending here: the characters are perhaps understandably paralyzed by their cognitive disconnect and nostalgia for the old world. Ultimately no one is called to account except by the inexorable forces of nature. Aargh.