A Tidy Armageddon
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The world is transformed into what looks like a massive warehouse overnight, and the result is a suspenseful and action-rich tale as humanity is forced to face the scale of its consumption
The world is utterly transformed: every product of human creation has been organized by an unknown hand into a vast grid of nine-story blocks, each comprised of a single item type: watering cans, lighthouses, fake Christmas trees, helicopters, plastic spoons, and everything else Earth’s culture and technology have ever produced, stacked in homogenous towers and separated by a maze of passageways.
Navigating this depopulated environment, a small contingent of diverse soldiers tries to make sense of this enigmatic apocalypse while desperately searching for survivors. They are led by Elsie Sharpcot, a Cree woman who has endured the military’s rampant racism and misogyny, and Dorian Wakely, her PTSD-afflicted second-in-command. Both veterans of the war in Afghanistan, they lead a group of army misfits while they all struggle — against the elements and each other — to survive.
Passing with fear and wonder through this museum of human achievement, provisioning themselves from its resources, the group races to outrun the approaching winter and find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Panhuyzen (The Sky Manifest) explores some fascinating ideas in this apocalyptic tale of Canadian soldiers trekking through a radically altered North American landscape, but gets bogged down in mundane details. Sgt. Elisabeth Sharpcot is mysteriously ordered to take her section of soldiers—eight men and women, including herself—into an underground bunker. When they emerge three weeks later, the world as they knew it is gone. In its place, all of humanity's goods and detritus have been sorted by type into nine-story-tall blocks by some mysterious force. As the soldiers traverse the grid made up by this uncanny assemblage and search for other human survivors and answers, the characters' gripping internal and external struggles are interrupted by lists of the subcategories of goods found in each block ("The collection included plain brown tubes, plus many branded Sonotube, Bomix, Formatube, Newform, Tubbox, Quik-Tube, Handiforms, and Caraustar EASY-POUR"), which quickly becomes tiresome, particularly as the journey grows increasingly bleak and questions remain unanswered. Readers will struggle to get through this one.
