A hard book to rate for me, because the voice and style are very much up my alley. Many of the negative reviews I found to be a bit silly, citing, essentially, just diction. The idea that the author’s prose is flowery or overwritten is such a boring critique at this point. Because really, you just mean this doesn’t read like Hemingway or commercial fiction. It’s not purple, it’s descriptive writing. It’s good writing. It’s just not to your taste and because you dislike them, you completely miss the point of their implementation, assuming a lack of craft. I would rate a book higher just to spite the opinions of these clipped and robotic prose advocates tbh.

But I digress, clearly. The sentence-by-sentence and overall craft at a prose level is really pleasing to me. It serves a purpose in characterizing each character and codifying their perspectives. This matters a lot, since the book is interrogating the demographics of the characters in relation to the dread of the ostensibly nebulous world-ending events.

On this front, when it’s at its best, the novel truly excels.

I love the way it critiques class, racial divides, generational gaps, education, maturity level. All these various components of a person, as well as their digressions into their past, generated a unique interest in the narrative for me.

Where this falls apart for me somewhat, is I felt like only some characters were more realized than others. The seemingly ostracized feel like they garner only a very myopic context, which goes somewhat against the theme. And more importantly, against the tension trying to be evoked.

I like the idea of not being able to retreat from the world-altering. The reliance on our somewhat archaic, somewhat unknowable infrastructure definitely is not in place to nurture us. The novel slowly becomes a stark depiction of white western culture from multiple vantage points. Another in the plus column.

But I only somewhat cared about not knowing what was happening; by the time stakes are involved, the ball was already rolling and gone. This whole story feels before an impetus. A short story before the plot. Fairly toothless, to be honest. Almost perfunctory without a plot to ground the themes and concept, which are rich. Ultimately, I felt like this entire book completely hinges on whether you find a very specific kind of horror—one in which, I think, most millennials and younger have already accepted as a sort of daily reckoning.

It’s no wonder it’s polarizing.

To conclude: I had a good time consuming it; couldn’t put it down, in fact. So I happily straddle the good, 3 stars, mostly hit my expectations, mark.