Beautiful, exciting, and quietly terrifying

So as not to spoil your reading experience, I will avoid plot and speak about the world Blake Crouch builds in this book. It is a near future Earth where the painful pre-apocalyptic symptoms of environmental neglect are a degree more advanced than in our present. Both the natural world, the built environment, and the social fabric, are frayed. Key illusions, such as the concept of all Americans being important, or that humans have mastery over the world around them, are done with. Enough large scale events, irreversible in nature, such as the abandonment of certain cities, and famines and conflicts, have occurred so that most people no longer have hope or modernist optimism.

Crouch shows us this world as his characters and their stories move through it, with minimal exposition apart from on a few specific historical points. The general state of things is conveyed incidentally, unobtrusively and with skill.
A very satisfying stand alone novel that I recommend to anyone who is susceptible to environmental pessimism. Allow Blake Crouch to somehow make you more hopeful with his imagining of a bleak future thoughtfully considered by his complex characters.

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