Hiron Ennes' LEECH

A lot of books I read nowadays feel like video games in prose, and Hiron Ennes' debut novel, Leech is a perfect example of this. It starts with our narrator riding a train through a snowy landscape to a destination that feels very much like the end of the line at the end of the world, and I couldn't stop thinking of that great old classic point and click adventure that was Benoit Sokal's Syberia games.

The world our unnamed protagonist inhabits, though, is somewhat lacking in those games' clockwork charm (aesthetically it's closer cousin is Mark Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children) though it is heavy on their air of decayed glamor as our protagonist enters a decrepit chateau in the extreme north to take up the post of resident physician amidst a family straight out of the best gothic fiction: a baron, on the brink of death for decades but kept alive by all sorts of gimcrack technology that allows him to, for instance, leave his colon upstairs in his tower bedroom when he joins his household for formal dinners (a memorable moment of maintenance has our protagonist holding "the congested metallic sponge that passes for his spleen" for instance); the baron's feckless and alcoholic son; the son's louche and perpetually pregnant wife; their twin daughters, all but literally joined at the head and possessed of strange paranormal abilities; the capable but mute houseboy who keeps it all running more or less smoothly...

But the chateau's denizens are nowhere near as weird as our multiform (and, for many reasons, delightfully unreliable) narrator, who is quite possibly the most unusual protagonist I've encountered in literature, in that they are a hive mind that parasitically occupies innumerable human bodies scattered throughout what's left of the world.* Calling themselves the Institute, this parasite has taken over the entire health care industry, such as it is in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in which the moon has cracked open and the land is mostly toxic and frozen and inhabited by all kinds of bizarre monsters.  

The instance of the Institute who is our narrator, therefore, is constantly** experiencing things their other selves are doing in warm research libraries and cold operating rooms and filthy tenements and down dangerous mine shafts while they sip water at the baron's miserable dinner table and get felt up under that table by the baron's daughter-in-law -- or, as happens quite soon in the narrative, dissect a corpse that used to be one of their selves only to find that what killed that body was another parasite!

Late in the novel, or narrator has questions and insights that really apply to us all:

I don't know if I'm even human, or if I'm only the synthesis of all my infections, if bits and pieces of Pseudomycota and The Institute and every other organism that has colonized me are still fighting in my blood, trying to conquer the territories of my muscles and consciousness. I don't know if I'm only an accumulation of organized cells that has deluded itself into thinking it's something more.

I'm reminded a little of one of my favorite books that I hate (as in it squicks me out every time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because it's so good), the late Greg Bear's Blood Music, in which the somatic cells of a researcher's body become individually sentient and self-aware after he injects himself with a research product in order to steal it. Bear didn't address all the other cells that occupy a human body like, say, gut bacteria, but if he had the result might be something like our narrator and their struggles to understand themselves as the novel's central drama evolves inside them. 

Even before the existential dilemmas kick in, Ennes slips in clues here and there, starting very early into the story, suggesting that our narrator's grasp on the situation and even on their own identity is not what it seems, and it's only the least of these that relies on well-known canards about how parasites can manipulate their hosts! There's so much more going on here. So much! And I haven't even talked really about Emile, the aforementioned mute houseboy who is the product of a few centuries of an isolated human population's evolution into what might be a whole new sub-species of gray-skinned human with an apparent resistance to both of the novel's weird invasive organisms! Or about the whole Montish culture from which he comes, with its tradition of shaggy dog stories which... kind of signpost that the reader is in for an ambiguous ending, as fits a tale told by an unreliable narrator...

I am certainly finishing my reading year on a high note, even if nothing else is going all that well. I'm going to try to finish a few more reads before we ring in 2023 (ugh) but if I don't, happy new year. Or something. Watch out for creepy black grassy things in jars.

*And of course, since our protagonist has multiple bodies -- multiple lives -- at their disposal, there is also a potential for respawning, making this story even more video game-like.

**Except when it's not; distance isn't entirely obviated by the Institute's nature. Much like radio signals can't penetrate very far underground and attenuate over vast distances, the Institute's ability to communicate with itself diminishes at inconvenient moments, too.

"I cannot quite understand these fables, not can I discern their use. I suspect they are born from the peculiar, suspect anxiety that there is something fundamentally fragile about humanness. The dead that perhaps, if one takes time to peel back the skin of another, they will find an imposter, a machine, or, stranger still, something like me."

R.F. Kuang's BABEL: Or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

R.F. Kuang has been on my radar for a while but it was this year that she published a book that I absolutely knew I was going to have to read right away, not just put on the never-ending TBR list. I mean, it's about language translation, foreign language study, and colonialism. And Mandarin! The only way it could have been more in my wheelhouse would be if Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator's Revolution somehow also managed to concern insects, amirite?

The novel starts off an early chapter with a neat little quotation from none other than C.S. Lewis, long before the first time reader realizes the quotation is probably meant ironically, as something to be subverted, rather than reverently, as something to be illustrated and upheld:

"But this shall never be: to us remains

One city that has nothing of the beast, 

That was not built for gross, material gains, 

Sharp, wolfish power or empire's glutted feast."

Lewis was celebrating his university, Oxford, but we can never be sure how sincerely he meant these lines. He never struck me as an especially naive man, but nor did he seem a great satirist. At any rate, in our world the notion of a university as a place above and apart from commerce and politics is a belief more useful as a rhetorical device than a realistic description, and in the world of Babel it's cause for bitter laughter before our young hero has finished the first day of his studies there. 

In this alternate universe, it has been discovered in the late Renaissance/Early Enlightenment period that silver has certain magical properties that can be harnessed by engraving it with pairs of words from different languages that mean approximately the same thing but not precisely; it's the tension between the differences that powers the forces employed to use silver bars as talismans that can alter the world. Fir example, a bar engraved with the English word "meticulous" and its Latin forerunner (etymology matters!) "metus" (meaning "fear or dread") has the effect of producing "a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work" -- or as a character complains when they're lent it to use in preparing for exams "It doesn't tell you where you went wrong... It just makes you want to vomit for no reason you can discern."

Once a bar has been so engraved, it must be activated by a person fluent in both of the languages employed, making speakers of foreign languages* into human resources of great importance, to be highly prized -- so much so that some members of the upper crust of this universe's British Empire have resorted to breeding them like livestock. Such are the origins of our hero, a half-English, half-Chinese boy who takes the English name of Robin Swift since he's not allowed to use the surname of his biological father, a professor of translation at Oxford University, who has allowed Robin to grow up for a few years with his mother under the guidance of a hired British nanny but who then callously allows Robin's mother to die of cholera when Robin is old enough -- about eight years old -- to be useful, fluent enough to think and dream in his native Mandarin Chinese but also in the English he grew up speaking with his nanny.

Soon Robin is whisked away to England to continue his education with private tutors, living in his father's posh London home but rarely interacting with the man, until it's time for Robin to matriculate at University College, Oxford, in 1830, when its mighty silver-working facility, Babel, is at its mightiest. Someday Robin will be one of the rare and valued few who can make new magical silver bars to continue enriching the British Empire, which sits at the center of endless flows of raw silver and thus of all other forms of the world's wealth.

Silver is also accelerating the pace of industrial development relative to our own world; the magic of silver bars is automating processes that required human input well into our 20th century. Here the Luddites were but an early wave or violent protest and crushing poverty experienced by Britain's artisans and skilled laborers back while Victoria was still just a pretty little princess being spoiled by the Sailor King.

Robin quickly comes to sympathize with his fellow colonials (his class at Babel consists of a young Muslim man from India, a young Haitian woman, and a token native Brit who is still marginalized at Oxford because she's a woman) and with the plight of the newly unemployed, and gets drawn into a secret society that relies on marginalized students like him to pilfer silver and engraving materials from the fortress of Babel for use undermining the Empire. That society, called Hermes, has an even closer claim on his loyalty than might first seem apparent, though: before there was a Robin, there was a Griffith, who was taken from his own Chinese mother too early to develop true fluency in his native language and thus proved a disappointment to their father. D'oh!

Much of the tension of the novel's first third or so, then, arises from Robin's keen awareness of his situation as both a valuable resource to the Empire but also a complete dependent on it: a slave, though a well-treated one who is being allowed to do what he loves most.

Inevitably, our hero finds his way back to his birth city of Canton just in time to find himself interpreting a confrontation between a British businessman and General Lin Zexu over Britain's arrogant insistence on continuing to import opium into China despite the Emperor's increasingly strict edicts against the stuff. Meaning Robin is there for the first salvo of the first Opium War. And to see his last excuses for pretending not to see the problems attendant on his enjoyable situation, the price paid by others for his privileges and comforts, go up in smoke. Well, something has to incite the titular translators' revolution, doesn't it?

This takes place in the final third of the book amidst broken fellowships and surprise alliances as everybody discovers the real powers of solidarity and class consciousness -- and of unintended consequences. Suddenly every chicken the British has ever wronged comes home to roost in its new Tower of Babel. And they might have brought a bomb or two...

The result of all of these odd juxtapositions and weird story beats is an exciting and deeply affecting novel that I'm going to remember for a long time and will probably want to read more than a few times. Phew!

*Especially speakers of non-European languages, because speakers of these have been in contact with English and vice-versa for too long and loan words and other cross-pollinations like false cognates and folk etymologies drain too much of the necessary tension out of those word pairings,  meaning that bars engraved with an English and a French or Italian or German word are weak sauce by the time our story begins. 

Jason Pargin's IF THIS BOOK EXISTS YOU'RE IN THE WRONG UNIVERSE

I've been known to use a certain GIF rather a lot to express my reaction to a certain kind of news item or framing of same. I find it needs no explanation - this is a guy laughing his ass off as he simultaneously realizes that he -- and, incidentally, the rest of the world -- is deeply, deeply fucked.*

It's also a pretty good representation of my demeanor whenever one Jason Pargin, the novelist formerly known as David Wong, crashes a podcast, posts a TikTok (which he just started doing recently with some reluctance because he is not of that generation, but let me tell you he's killing it) or publishes another novel in the series originally known as JDATE (acronym for the title of the first novel, John Dies at the End), then as the John and Dave novels, and now for this fourth in the series finally and properly known as the John, Dave and Amy novels, giving Dave's long suffering but immensely capable and patient girlfriend her proper due. But now maybe they need to be called the John and Dave and Amy and Joy the Multiform From Another Dimension novels? But that might become unwieldy if/when he writes more.** Anyway, Pargin is the absolute master of eliciting the particular blend of emotions this GIF depicts, and it's not even close, to wit:

Pargin has made a name (or two) for himself as a tart and wry but painfully accurate commentator on a lot of the dumbest aspects of late 20th and early 21st century culture, first at Cracked and then with his prose fiction and acerbic nonfiction articles. He's like H.L. Mencken with carpal tunnel and mouse elbow.

And he likes horror, which is a genre perfectly suited to examining our dumb culture's greatest failings and dumbest pecadillos, his two boob heroes and the lady who loves them are both the best and the worst people to stand between us and the horrors we are loudly humming not to hear, squinting not to see, hurrying past, but then getting grabbed by a rubbery wig monster or giant hairy spider with a human tongue or [your grossest, most tasteless monster idea here] anyway. Who us gonna call? Sorry, wrong universe for the Ghostbusters, would Jay and Silent Bob with unwanted extrasensory perception and a predilection for shoddy homemade flamethrowers do?

Of course, one of the great unsung pleasures of these novels is watching the original duo, John and Dave (mostly Dave) develop from profane versions of the Scooby Gang But With Actual Monsters into well-rounded and relatively mature individuals capable of maintaining relationships with members of the community, clients, the police (for all that they still refer, in this new novel, to their primary contact as Detective Coiffure because dude uses a lot of hair gel) and each other. So on this fourth outing, they have real insight into why things keep happening the way they do and, most importantly and satisfyingly, real advice to give to people newly in the kind of predicaments in which they specialize. It's stopped being a tasteless joke, their world, for all that it still occasionally involves jaunts into side-universes where you can buy multiple flavors of vaginal cheese at the convenience store.

This new skill of theirs comes in very handy as they confront this novel's Big Bad in the form of a teenaged boy, Bas Galvaston (Bas is short for Sebastian, which, OK), who blundered into joining a sad cult of wannabe wizards only to quickly be singled out as their chosen one because it turns out he actually has powers. And this is where Pargin exercises his talent for extrapolating the worst possible version of current trends, because this cult is firmly convinced that not only is our entire universe a simulation, but that most of the people living in it are NPCs (non-player characters, i.e. just person-shaped software tools generated by the "game") and that the few real humans trapped within it would really be better off if the whole thing could just be shut down. Which Bas will eventually have the power to do, if correctly fostered, and if the cult in the here and now can assist by piggy backing on an incursion from a malign other dimension that has seeded our world with innocent seeming toy egg-with-app combos that, if correctly "fed" by the tyke lucky enough to possess an egg toy, will hatch into a cute stuffed animal of varying degrees of rarity -- except, of course, these eggs actually demand varying levels of human sacrifice ranging from bits of scalp to human teeth to eyeballs to skins and...

So yes, while our characters are somewhat more mature, the subject matter with which they're coping in the cursed town of Undisclosed is still as juvenile and gross as ever. And as universally threatening. It's just now that our heroes are starting to realize that they're not as young as they used to be, they're still in the socioeconomic basement of our society,  and that the precarity of their 20s is unsustainable, a theme given particular poignancy as Dave has several encounters with Fancy Dave, an alternate version of himself from a timeline in which John actually died, causing Dave to settle into a somewhat normal life married to Amy and raising children with her. Confronting the fact that this could be possible in any timeline shakes Dave even as he is forced to commit to saving the timeline in which none of it does, making this fourth JDATE the most affecting of them all so far, showing how much Pargin has grown as a storyteller while still very much being the guy who writes about using fireworks to destroy a brain-eating parasite that has caused a poor slob to hallucinate an entire happy relationship with a lady.

I sure hope there are some more of these in the pipeline.

*For those unable to place this, it's the final scene of John Carpenter's woefully underrated 1994 classic In the Mouth of Madness in which an insurance investigator, John Trent (Sam Neil) is sent on a wild shoggoth chase in northern New England to prove that the mysterious disappearance of the world's greatest horror novelist, Sutter Kane (Jürgen Prochnow) was actually a hoax to drum up publicity for his latest blockbuster novel, which is rumored to drive its readers insane. It is simply the best, but it's stupidly hard to find streaming most of the time. It's worth any effort to track it down, though, I assure you. 

**I really hope it's "when" dear readers.

Namwali Serpell's THE FURROWS: AN ELEGY

"There's a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some before and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn't creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It interrupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It says if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening."

Are we, for the rest of our lives, going to be able to distinguish COVID period literature from pre-COVID at a glance, or will the things that we think distinguish it just fade into the background noise of all writing from all times? I suppose we'll have to wait a while to find out but right now I feel like I can spot a pandemic book (or maybe it's a post-Trump thing?) immediately just from the way characters seem to experience time. It's there in Chuck Wendig's Wayward (a sequel to a book specifically about a pandemic that was published just months before what we in 2022 are still referring to as "the" pandemic) and it's perfectly encapsulated in the above passage from Namwali Serpell's novel-length exploration of the experience of grief, The Furrows: An Elegy.

As readers of this blog already know, I really, really loved this author's The Old Drift and consider it a pretty much perfect piece of speculative fiction, so I was getting pretty frantic as I kept checking to see if my public library had acquired her latest yet, only every time to be disappointed until I thought to check and see if they had it on dead tree, and sure enough, it's still right there on the New Arrivals shelf. Bugger me, I was going to have to use my hands and arms to hold it open and turn the pages to read it. It had better be worth it, I sighed as I grabbed it to take home.

Well, it sure was, though the physical pain of reading it is pretty well matched by the emotional damage it has to inflict, because this is the story of a young woman, Cassandra, who's little brother, Wayne, died on her watch when she was 12 and he was seven, and who's family fell apart soon after, the way that families often do on the death of a child. Cassandra's mother, unconvinced by the explanation little Cassandra gave her of what happened and also by the disappearance of Wayne's body, plunges into the forming of a foundation dedicated to finding Wayne and other missing little angels and neglects her even more than she already had (an artist, she had a tendency to disappear into her studio for entire summers, leaving her older child to mind the younger when they ventured out into the world); Cassandra's father soon deserts them altogether to start a new family with a new wife. And Cassandra gets foisted off on her unpleasant grandmother a lot until she is a grown woman adrift in the world and constantly, mysteriously, encountering beautiful young men (there is almost always an element of sexual attraction in these encounters) who she quickly comes to believe are her long lost baby brother, all grown up and ready to tell her all about what has kept them apart all of these years.

I lost someone very, very close to me my first year away from home, quite possibly the closest friend I'd ever had and someone I once thought I would marry, and for decades I had dreams in which he turned up still alive with a story to tell, and encountered people in real life who I could almost believe were him from time to time, so reading The Furrows was a lot like, not so much picking scabs after all this time but digging at scars. I was prepared for this, knowing that grief was the theme of this book, and that Serpell is a stunning writer, but I still had to put this down even more often than I usually do with hardcover books just to catch my breath from the emotional blows it had to deal.

It's also a surreal read, in that we get multiple versions of how and where Cassandra, who at 12 has internalized the idea that "Wayne was a creature for my watching, for my keep" loses her little brother, and that an uncanny "windbreaker man" appears near the end of each narrative. The windbreaker man's constant appearance in these variant narratives is a key reason why Cassandra's mother traps herself in a prison of unbelief when he proves to be as elusive as lost Wayne, every time. Every time, too, that Cassandra meets someone, often under another name, whom she concludes is actually her brother, the circumstances are weird and uncertain -- and if that isn't a perfect encapsulation of how grief and imperfect memory keep on swamping us throughout our lives, I don't know what is.

Adding layers of ambiguity is Cassandra's time with therapists, each of whom has a different understanding of her trouble and a different recommendation for how she deals with it, a series of them guiding her through the processes of remembering (which we now know is rewriting/re-imagining more than it is replaying a perfectly recorded scene) and then simplifying the narrative of her trauma, whittling it down to what the therapists consider its essentials. They all seem more interested in focusing on Cassandra's guilt than in questioning whether it was appropriate for her mother to load her with so much responsibility, for instance.

And that's all just the first half of The Furrows; midway through, we switch narrators and suddenly enter the perspective of the man/men she has been encountering, who has a whole different set of motivations and experiences and ideas about what has been going on between him and Cassandra and her missing brother, and you'll never in a thousand years guess what's actually going on with him. I'll just say this elevates The Furrows from just another lovely and sensitive meditation on loss and survivorship to a full on consideration of and confrontation with most of the other ways that life can hurt us until we cry and won't stop even then.

 

But even that's not enough for Serpell, who, recall, originally dazzled me with a pretty much perfect piece of speculative fiction/African futurism. So of course she's got more than this going on!

"So, this is what time looks like to us. A rope, a line pulled tight. But that’s just the past, the things that already happened, one after the other, in a line. But the future?” Mo drew a fan of lines at the top end of the rope, like it was unraveling. “Threads of possibility. Infinite threads.But you see, when time goes on, they get twisted together into the rope. The coulda-woulda-shouldas get twisted inside of what we did."

The second half of the novel utterly re-contextualizes the first, down to all of Cassandra's different versions of how she lost her little brother, teasing us to the very end with the idea that something supernatural, or at least timey-wimey, is in store for us, all by way of distracting us from the love story that is actually taking place just outside of our field of attention. But Cassandra told us, right at the novel's very beginning, "I don't want to tell you what happened, I want to tell you how it felt." How things feel doesn't always make sense, doesn't always obey linear time or fixed identity, is sometimes kaleidoscopic and sometimes slams us to a halt at an unexpected place. Serpell has captured this pefectly. She's joined the ranks of authors whose work I will snatch up without hesitation, just because it's hers.

Next time I'll be a little better prepared emotionally, though. Yeouch!

Chuck Wendig's WAYWARD (Narr by Dominic Hoffman and Xe Sands)

Not long before COVID-19 first swept the globe, Chuck Wendig gifted the world with a retroactively prescient story of a pandemic that threatened to end civilization, but only as background to an even stranger tale. Wanderers first presented us with a bizarre phenomenon that shared some qualities of a pandemic but more with a thriller plot, as first a lone teenaged girl and then soon hundreds of others began walking, implacably and seemingly mindlessly, on an unknown path to an unknown but very distant destination in a weird and compulsory pilgrimage around the United States. 

Spoilers for that first novel are inevitable in this post, by the way. 

By the end of Wanderers, we learned what had caused this strange migration - nanobots in the Wanderers' bodies that shunted their minds into a shared virtual reality of life in a small Colorado town that was their eventual destination while turning their bodies into inexhaustible and nearly indestructible walking machines that needed neither food nor water nor rest but which exploded messily if they were contained or restrained in any way. A guiding artificial intelligence governed their flocking behavior and kept them safe with the help of a small army of the Wanderers' friends and loved ones, soon known as "Shepherds", who, after realizing what was going on, chose to accompany the Wanderers on their route all over the United States. Once they reached Colorado, the flock dispersed to various houses and hotels and bunkhouses in the town of Ouray and went into suspended animation, there to wait in safety while a zoonotic fungal disease ravaged the rest of the world. 

Wayward begins as the Wanderers finally awaken some five years later to begin rebuilding the world, starting with the town of Ouray, which was settled by a handful of their former Shepherds who managed to survive the plague and worked through the years to give the Wanderers a head start when they woke up.

 

The Wanderers have not inherited the entire Earth, however; there are small pockets of humanity with whom to trade and whatnot... and also a small army of militia types who had originally harassed the Wanderers on their Wander at the behest of a radio preacher type, Matthew, (who had a change of heart late in the first novel and became a Shepherd of the wandering Flock), and of Republican presidential nominee, Ed Creel (a thinly disguised Trump figure in most ways, except he's somewhat more competent and less, er, encumbered). Which means Ouray already has Enemies even before the Sleepers Awaken.

Oh, and the artificial intelligence that guided them to Ouray? Also released the original disease that made their pilgrimage necessary, because it had long ago concluded that the only way to save humanity was to kill off most of it before humanity killed off the whole planet. And still thinks it knows best. And has developed an exceptionally horrible way to continue to force the former Wanderers to do its bidding, to whit, possessing the newborn child of the primary heroine of Wanderers and playing off the town's gratitude to warp most of them into regarding it as a kind of God.

Oh, and its presence within the baby isn't very good for the baby, of course. 

And so once again the mighty Shana Stewart, older sister of the first Wanderer and thus the first Shepherd, has a ton of responsibility dumped on her before she's even old enough, by the laws of the former world, to drink. Hers is the child creepily inhabited by the AI in such a way that whenever she or anyone else comes into physical contact with the baby, they get shunted back into the virtual reality in which everybody slept and are thus at the AI's mercy, except long ago Shana saw a possible flaw in its control that can maybe be exploited to free humanity if she and her companions are very, very lucky. 

Soon Shana and Dr. Benji Ray, originally a CDC employee and one-time lover of the original programmer of the A.I., and slightly washed up Irish rock star Pete Corley, who sort of latched onto the flock last novel for the publicity but then used his outsized charisma to help defend them from crazies and poor public opinion as the pandemic started, on a desperate cross-country trip in a jury-rigged prototype solar-powered car to see if they can make it to the CDC's headquarters in Atlanta to find what they need to end the AI's weird and culty reign.

Meanwhile, Creel and his sideshow, who survived the pandemic in a luxuriously appointed former missile silo in Kansas until his employees and subordinates woke up to the fact that he didn't have any power that they didn't give him, emerge and, having assassinated the actual President of the United States last novel, assumes the title of President and starts seeking ways to assert his dominance, with some mysterious high tech assistance of his own. That guides him, also, toward Atlanta.

As the story proceeds, the audio narration duties are shared by the same team who brought us Wanderers, Dominic Hoffman, narrating mostly from Benji's and Creel's points of view, and Xe Sands, from Shana's, but where in the previous novel these were easily divided up into chapters, as more narrative clubs are twirling through the air this time, so there are more shifts of point of view, even in the middle of chapters. Wisely, the producers did not choose to switch narrators every single time this happens, but whenever there is a major shift in the action that will sustain the other point of view for more than a few paragraphs, they do. This leaves Hoffman trying to voice Shana on occasion, not entirely successfully, and Sands to voice Benji and Creel (and Pete), somewhat less jarringly. There was not going to be a way to divide this up perfectly as this is a much less episodic novel, so all I can really conclude is that they did the best they could, the producers. But I only really got annoyed once or twice over the course of a good 22+ hours, so I'll count this as a win.

As for the novel itself, as you've probably surmised, Wayward is a much wilder ride than Wanderers, with more grandly science fictional elements and higher stakes. Wendig keeps it all grounded in character like the pro he is, though, as Shana, Benji and Pete face genuine if occasionally amusing danger but keep their focus on their mission and their found-family love for one another; Shana's sister Nessie, saddled back in Ouray with the care of Shana's uncanny child, tries desperately to hold off the AI's ever-tighter grip on the hearts and minds of the town (with the help of ex-preacher Matthew and ex-cop and ex-Sheperd, Marcy -- Marcy vying with Pete for My Favorite Character); and Ed Creel and his strange allies/adversaries get ever closer to the goal they think will let him -- or someone -- Take It All.

Inevitably there are shades of prior sprawling post-apocalyptic horror, notably Stephen King's The Stand and Robert McCammon's Swan Song (the latter getting explicitly name checked here as the characters notice the similarity of some of their predicaments) but without King's tendency to ignore character agency in favor of forcing them through his predetermined plot or McCammon's overt reliance on The Supernatural for adversity. Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence stand in for the supernatural here, but Wendig keeps these on a relatively tight rein (except, occasionally, where Creel is concerned in the novel's climax, and hey, even as implausible new abilities go, it could have been a lot worse).

All in all, Wayward does exactly what we needed it to: it satisfyingly concludes all the character arcs from the prior novel, points their way into a future without our voyeuristic attention to them, and filled all the middle bits with excellent action set-pieces, spectacular but well-earned character deaths, angst over the fate of a Very Good Boy (a golden retriever named Gumball), and, most importantly, some hope for the future. Which, as this ridiculous year of 2022 comes to a close, is no mean feat.