I found out about this author last month from a promotional post on Bluesky for her latest book (Presumably The Misheard World, though I can’t find the post) and now I’ve read two of her books. I am not generally a horror fan, but I think it is more gore and graphic violence, and this book, while not without violence and gore, didn’t read as horror to me. I guess I need to keep expanding my horizons.
All the women died. They contracted some strange sickness, a yellow fungal growth, and there are no more. Now a group of men, who may be the last men in the world–they don’t know–and struggling with the end times. It is a mashup of “I Who Have Never Known Men” and “Children of Men.” Nate, the protagonist, is a storyteller, and keeps the other men and boys entertained every night with his stories. His uncle Ted takes him out one evening and they discover that the Beauties, fungal creatures, have grown out of the ground from the women’s bodies.
This book is about gender roles, societal collapse, gender fluidity, acceptance of change (society and own self) and several other things as well. What would it mean that all the women are gone. How do we find love at the end of the world? Yet it is told in such a simple language (I’ve seen it described as fairy tale-like) and in just over 100 pages, there is a lot to digest.
I’ll be thinking about this book for a while.