A Gothic dystopian fantasy that sidesteps the genre’s conventions and tidy endings.
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.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2025
ISBN: 9789699392672
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mess Hall Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.
When one woman takes on another’s identity to uncover a crime, they both become suspects in a murder.
Aubrey Price and Camille Bayliss come from different worlds, only crossing paths because of the discovery that Camille’s husband, powerful lawyer Ben Bayliss, is hiding something terrible that affects them both. As the novel opens, Aubrey is driving Camille’s Range Rover, then teetering into a bar on Camille’s high heels, with Camille’s dress and credit cards and a wig that mimics Camille’s hair, pretending to be her because Ben tracks his wife’s every move and expenditure, and Camille wants to create a smokescreen while she sneaks into his office in search of evidence of that unnamed secret. But the scheme goes awry, and the women become each other’s alibis after Camille finds Ben murdered in their home. The first part of the book builds suspense and misdirection well, with Aubrey and Ben’s straight-arrow partner, Hank Landry, serving as first-person observers in some chapters while others track Camille. She’s a wealthy and privileged woman but not a happy one, stuck under the thumbs of her husband and her tyrannical father, Randall Everett, who pretty much runs their small Louisiana town. Aubrey was orphaned as a teen when her parents died in a car crash and has proudly fended for herself ever since, coming to depend on her four roommates, who have become friends. But as the cast of characters grows, it seems as if almost everyone in town has a motive for killing Ben, and the piling up of suspects and movements among different timelines can sometimes be confusing. And it all comes to a frustrating end when, after a whole school of red herrings, the solution to Ben’s murder arrives out of far left field.
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593834459
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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