THE NEVER NOT YES

A hard-bitten band of survivors struggles to retain its humanity in an electricity-starved America.

Epps’ novel deftly avoids the standard issue tropes that have defined dystopian fiction for over 50 years, like barren urban deserts, mutant vampires, zombie slaughterfests, or some type of elaborate autocratic scenario. As the novel opens, Antonio “Ant” Hobbes finds himself struggling to navigate a landscape “where cars were rarely observed like endangered species,” making it necessary to walk, or ride on horseback, alongside highways now barren of traffic. It’s an unpredictable, dangerously arbitrary world in which an uncontrolled pandemic rages through Southeast Asia, groceries rot in refrigerators and on ransacked shelves, and vermin run rampant, “feeding on the remaining, festering foodstuffs.” The existing political order collapses into warring confederations, which wreak havoc on everything and everyone else. During Ant’s travels and struggles for survival, he meets others, including Charlie and Roland, a gay couple; Jenna and her husband, Jeremy, a battle-scarred veteran haunted by his experiences of fighting an invasion of Taiwan; and Mina, a lonely woman trying (and failing) to manage a massive home with gas-powered generators and rainwater collected in barrels. This steady drumbeat of human misery unfolds through North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, where Charlie and Roland are hoping to strike a longer-term resolution of their problems with Rathausen, a feudal warlord who may not actually exist. This smaller-scale apocalypse feels well removed from the wider-screen imagery in films like Escape From New York but at the same time more realistic.

Epps ably explores the theme of ordinary people trying to retain their humanity against improbably long odds and in a world gone haywire. For Ant, the ultimate test of that resolve comes in the form of a murderous, psychotic ring of thugs led by the fittingly named Harlan Butcher, a self-proclaimed “eater of men” and “consumer of towns,” who’s also hellbent on enslaving Ant, with whom he has a history, and his companions. If Ant accepts a devil’s bargain, Butcher will allow him to live, and he’ll also forgo a vicious settling of an old debt. The author does a fine job of plumbing the nitty-gritty nuances and backstory of the unthinkable trade that Butcher demands. And it’s an outcome that will keep readers guessing right until the final page. The prose matches the characters’ moods, ranging from terse and resigned (“Hope hobbled along”) to jarringly graphic, as when Jenna helps her husband fend off a band of vagrants (“Killing had come more naturally than she would have imagined”). All the author’s tight-knit pacing and plotting, however, feels undercut by an ending that doesn’t offer easy answers or clarity. Is the author priming readers for a sequel or an ongoing franchise? All in all, it’s a worthy read, although whether the last-minute ambiguity is an unwelcome feature, or merely a bug, will come down to preference.

A Gothic dystopian fantasy that sidesteps the genre’s conventions and tidy endings.