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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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