Apocalypses are, as a rule, not exactly places of merriment and jollity.
The human race has been decimated, if it survives much at all, zombies/aliens/malevolent viruses/ naturally violent phenomenon stalk the land and civilisation are we know it is toast and likely to remain so in one of those evolutionary deadends that little little to no room for a miraculous bounce back.
There’s not a lot of fun to be had, and Death to Anyone Who Reads This by Hugh Howey and Elinor Taylor does not, for a gun-toting second pretend otherwise.
In this wholly engaging novella-lenth story, the title alone of which is a sign that this way human monsters come, we meet up again ———- SPOILER ALERT!!!!! ———— with a plucky if accidental survivor named Rita – she was first introduced in The Balloon Hunter which saw her holed up in a Costco (until she wasn’t), sending out postcards attached to balloons which seemed like a lovely way to reach out and connect with others … until it wasn’t – who is out on the road, realising anew just how awful it is out in the lawless environs of a world lost to climate catastrophe.
The kicker is she suspects this particular plunging of the climatic sword might have hand from Homo Sapiens and not in a pumping out way too many greenhouse gases kind of way, and that we were, surprise, surprise, the architects of what has become our effective doom.
This was the highway my mom took when she drove me off to college. Is that where I’m heading? Trying to regress? Back to the last place I can remember being happy?
Any direction is as good as another. Away from the fog. Upwind. Following the traffic.
Once again, we get to know Rita by a series of signed journal entries – she muses at one point, after the identifying folly of the distinctly not-anonymous balloon postcards, that maybe she should stop letting people know her name before realising it’s likely too late – where she muses on all kinds of things from whether she should use a gun (“no” until “yes, maybe” okay “definitely”) to how hungry you get when food isn’t available on brightly-lit supermarket shelves and if you can trust anyone in a world where survival of the fittest has become quite monstrously Darwinian.
She is a highly likeable person who, much like many of us, pines and yet doesn’t for the “before times” – for the record she misses college and hanging out with friends; she does not miss her broken marriage or a host of other civilisational ills – and who makes some very smart decisions, and some not so smart to her regret (one involves a microwave and it’s a doozy of an error), and who is the everyperson out in a world that is determined to wipe us off the face of the earth by its hand or ours.
It’s even way bet who win that particular tussle for dominance but it’s say that the apocalypse as rendered in Death to Anyone Who Reads This is not the sort of place you want to be if you value staying alive, being connected or feeling like humanity has any kind of worthwhile future.
Hugh Howey (courtesy Wikipedia)
(courtesy official Elinor Taylor Facebook page)
Quite apart from its evocative descent into the end times, which some rather interestingly believe is not the real one because the Bible’s predictive tales of Revelations-style doom haven’t happened yet (and oh yes, rather cutely and naively, they still hang onto the idea of an afterlife), what really sets Death to Anyone Who Reads This apart from the apocalyptic storytelling masses is how much humanity it judiciously inserts into proceedings.
Whereas many stories are content to thrust cardboard characters into end-of-the-world hell and watch what happens – it’s spectacular and vicariously unnerving but it makes little to no emotional impact – Death to Anyone Who Reads This goes all in on the human aspect of things, both good and bad, giving us a realistically moving account of what might happen when it’s person against person in a world long shorn of creature comforts and societal niceties.
Centre of the action is Rita, of course, who is our eyes and ears and heart on this broken earth and who, despite a series of close encounters with people who would do her rather life-ending harm, still jumps at the chance to connect with others, a sign that while everything may be shouting “STAY AWAY!”, we still want to get up too close and personal.
She knows it isn’t wise, and often demurs on the side of caution, but if you have a beating heart and a need for the voice and touch of others, and really who doesn’t when it comes down to it, you’ll find much to identify with Rita and her suspect decisions to keep writing down accounts of who she is, what’s she’s seen and where she is (not the wisest plot going journal-heavy, especially after the balloons debacle, but she’s trying to connect in some form with others and make sense of a situation that defies anything but the most basic of assessments).
Have to keep reminding myself that I’m Dakota now. Mustn’t slip up, not once. Wilma and I are building something special here. She let me into her home, and I try to think if I would’ve done the same if she showed up at Costco. Would I have let her in? Share my space? My supplies? Trusted her as I slept? I’m not entirely sure I would.
Written in alternating journal entries that bounce between her and an unnamed man who is writing in her now-discarded journal – don’t worry; Rita could well be alive and well and has left the journal for others to find (with that title, it seems!) – and who may be about to do something based on clues she has left on her unwisely expansive but understandably human trail, Death to Anyone Who Reads This is a succinctly written but warmly emotional and emotively unnerving gem that nails what it would be like to be alive at the end of the world.
Yes, people are behaving quite appallingly to each other, and meals are from cans and upgrades in wardrobe and equipment are quite murderously violent affairs, but there’s still a real need for human connection and while it usually doesn’t end well, you love Rita for trying not once but twice to see if there’s any mileage left in the whole socialising disposition of Homo Sapiens.
There may not be but much of what makes Death to Anyone Who Reads This such artfully done, riveting reading is how, in world-building of the most expositional efficient but wonderfully full kind, it explores what trying to connect with others might be like, even if it happens in alternating journal entries long after the first author has discarded it to the ages and a fellow survivor who treats her story like a treat, and an instruction booklet in a world where there’s not a lot of getting to know you going on.
A more than worthy follow-up to The Balloon Hunter, which itself was a superb treatise of human connectivity and survival, Death to Anyone Who Reads This is a compelling tale rich with raw, relatable humanity, the horror of end times that are every bit as bad as you think they’ll be and a central character who reminds us that even when everything has fallen to pieces and no one should expect anything good to happen, that there are still people who do possibly unwise in a bid to keep connection flowing and their humanity alive.