GENERATION ANNIHILATION

After killing his abusive stepfather, a teenager goes on the lam, only to find a hideous fate awaiting him.

Shaun, who has red hair that he plans to dye to avoid detection, couldn’t let his stepfather hurt his mother anymore. While fleeing to his maternal grandfather’s cabin, he meets Cass, a girl with her own familial horrors, on the grounds of a “lunatic asylum.” Despite Cass’ warnings, Shaun keeps returning, eventually getting caught up in the asylum’s heinous objectives, which will determine whether he is Redeemable. An intriguing mix of urgency and gray morality kickstarts this tale, engaging readers with questions about what lurks in the asylum and how trustworthy Shaun is as a narrator and a person. But once inside the asylum, the attempts to justify the goals and methods of its borderline-eugenicist workers and funders strip away the haunting atmosphere and expose the underdeveloped bones of the story. Persistent fatphobia, casual molestation, and an overreliance on uninformed fears of those with mental illness and developmental differences undermine any attempts to sympathize with the troubled teens. Repetition, exposition, and stop-and-start plot developments interrupt any remaining flow, causing the story to end with a thud rather than a bang. Shaun and Cass are cued white.

A flashy start dragged down by unrealistic villainy and uneconomical writing.