THE CAVE

Survivors of a deadly global virus find one another and try to find a new home in Otero’s post-apocalyptic novel.

In the near future, a group of teenage girls forced to do manual labor at Real Impact—a boot camp for troubled youth in the Mexican desert—are largely cut off from the world. One day, one of the girls, Maggie, sees a car barrel through the camp’s fence; the driver jumps out and shoots the camp’s two sadistic taskmasters dead. The driver, Abigail, is the first outsider that the girls have seen in months, and she bears tragic news: “Everyone you know from back home is probably dead” due to a rampaging virus, Abigail says. “No. Definitely dead.” At the same time, a trio of motley travelers—30-somethings Warren and April and middle-aged Iraq War veteran Damian—are traveling on foot to San Diego, the next step on their journey to find April’s 10-year-old son, Valentino. Warren, a former history professor, is also trying to create a vaccine for the virus, using Damian and his dog as test subjects. When Damian overhears Warren’s plan, he runs off, leaving April and Warren to search the desolate landscape for him. In their travels, the two groups collide, and together, they just might be able to find some hope for humanity. In this fourth book in an ongoing series, following The Road (2020), Otero pens an exciting after-the-end story that, at some points, feels too real for comfort; its references to quarantining and mortality rates give this novel an eerily lifelike quality as it explores themes of survivalism, trauma, found families, and starting over. The overall structure of the narrative makes it feel a bit uneven at times, as the chapters from Maggie’s and Valentino’s third-person perspectives read more like a YA novel, while others read like fiction for adult audiences. Although it’s the fourth installment in its series, it can still be read as a stand-alone work, as the author does a fair job of covering the events of previous novels.

An engaging, if sometimes uncomfortably familiar, tale of pandemic survivors.