Two well-heeled Brooklynites, Amanda and Clay, have rented an Air Bnb in rural Long Island with their two adolescent children. Amanda overbuys at the supermarket, Clay smokes, the children swim in the pool. It’s an idyllic enclave, a place for them to ‘leave the world behind’, switch off from their busy jobs and the mundaneity of everyday life in the city.
Before long, though, there’s a knock on the door.
The detail in the writing is excruciating at times, both to beneficial and detrimental effect. When GH and Ruth knock at the door, the moment – suspended in time – is excruciating in all the right ways. We don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s clear that something very much is.
GH and Ruth are a wealthy Black couple in their sixties who own the vacation home. There is an immediate sizing up of these unwelcome guests (if you can call them that). They’ve clearly done well for themselves, and Amanda bristles. They say there’s been a power outage and all lines of communication in the city are down. The same, it turns out, is true for the vacation home – while the electricity remains, there is no TV, phone reception, or radio – just the same message on repeat: this is the emergency broadcast. GH and Ruth have asked to spend the night until they can all figure out what’s going on.
“Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos. There was only a collective faith in order.”
The characters are all granted rich interior lives, and the narration slides between their perspectives as things grow evermore uneasy. The tension is so well crafted, the atmosphere unbearable as they struggle to understand what’s happening, what nameless, terrible thing has occurred. The horror builds, piece by piece: a noise so terrible no-one can express it in words. A sudden flock of flamingos. The teenage son’s teeth falling out, simultaneously, horrifyingly, leaving bloody recesses where they once were.
This book has been around for long enough that I knew we wouldn’t get answers by the end. But Alam instead gives us an omniscient narrator who provides windows into what the future world might look like, hints at who lives and who dies. It’s an ingenious way of giving the reader tantalizing pieces of information about a post-apocalyptic world, without having to give that future shape and name.
I alluded to the purple prose above – I can absolutely see why it isolated and irritated readers (at one point the fridge is described as a ‘cacophony of magnets’) and there are some bodily descriptions that are particularly cringe-making. With more ruthless editing it would be a five-star read.
“They said the ocean was coming for them all. …They didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew.”
NOVELS AND TEACUPS 