272 pages
Published 2022
Read from September 4 to September 8
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
A long time ago, back when I ran a little online sci-fi magazine called Scareship, I published a short story by Kay Chronister. Now that she's "made it," to an extent, I feel weirdly proud to have been adjacent to an early step, however tiny, of her career.
This book is a lush, violent, inventive, repulsive, irresistible eco-horror, set generations into an apocalypse of poison rain and strange, ambling chimeras. Time and perspective alike are elastic; everyone has their own story of the collapse, whether visited upon the world by gods or the inevitable outcome of the hungry greed of capitalism. Las Vegas is a holy city, its saints marketed by a dispossessed upper class who, bored of mere survival, want the poor to lavish them with luxury again. Salvation itself is a con.
The parasitism of the upper classes, and the readiness with which men sell out girls and women in order to find community with each other, are the true horrors underlying this desert of beasts and madness. Chronister relays atrocities and monstrosities with prose of hallucinatory clarity, unflinching yet never pitiless, spilling mirages truer than anything shouted from a pulpit.
No comments:
Post a Comment