BLOOD LETTERS

A timeline of three intermingled takes on the costs of futuristic warfare.

This tale of a prolonged, monumental conflict opens in “YEAR ONE” with a declaration of war. On one side, there’s an advancing drone swarm that looks like fog and is known, appropriately enough, as FOG, or Foamic Open-cell Geometrophasics. FOG kills people from the inside out, disables radio signals, ignites gasoline, and turns its victims into zombielike monstrosities. Battling this strange and gruesome enemy are people like Augmented Infantry machine operator Kristopher Volsa and his adopted brother, Albany Prost, who serves in the Basic Infantry. Their technologically savvy sister, Millicent Volsa, endures the harsh conditions of refugee life before being coerced into enlisting. The trio’s yearslong record of letters, poems, black-and-white drawings, and computer reports forms an epistolary narrative chronicling their traumatic experiences. The earliest letters have a science-fiction jarhead charm to them before more disturbing machinations come to light. The terror of being disassembled alive by FOG is matched by that of having wounds healed by reassembly, which has lasting side effects and inspires a comparison to becoming “Frankenstein’s Monster.” The multimedia approach to the book is effective at communicating the transformational effects of the war, to which no one is immune.

Psychological and body horror given multiple forms, all of them scarring.