I have to say that I wasn't expecting this.

CJ Leede's first novel, 'Maeve Fly' was a subversive book too, but it was a relatively insular horror novel, focused ruthlessly on one woman as she destroyed the lives of others in the City of Angels. It was a feminist take on 'American Psycho but much more salacious. Maeve Fly wasn't any routine psychopath; she truly enjoyed what she did, as twisted as it often was. The contrasts set up by her working at the Happiest Place on Earth as a costumed princess, added to the effect by nailing the landing.

This, on the other hand, is modern America rephrased as apocalyptic horror and great swathes of it are uncomfortably close to where we could go in the next six months or six years. It has a female lead again, but Sophie Allen is almost the opposite of Maeve Fly. She's a decent human being for a start, but she's also a sixteen-year-old girl who's been held back from reality by her strict Catholic parents, so that she doesn't know how the world works. And then she's thrust rudely into it.

Notably, her parents seem to be decent human beings too. They're only doing what their teaching and consciences tell them to do. So they homeschooled Sophie and her twin brother Noah until a pastor told them that Sophie needed social interaction, at which point they put her into St. Mary's, a Catholic school. They also moved Noah out five years ago, placing him into Sacred Hearts, which is "a spiritual sanctuary for families afflicted with challenged children and teens". It isn't that he's a science nerd, not that they like that; it's because he's gay. They found him with a magazine that featured shirtless men kissing each other and sent him away. He was eleven.

That was the point that Sophie started to rebel, but she's so cloistered that she doesn't know how to do that, beyond sneaking in unapproved books from the library that aren't on her accepted list. There's no television in their house. She isn't allowed to read her father's newspaper. There's zero conversation in a house where the family eats together in silence. She's picked up knowledge as a fan of "for Dummies" books but it's all abstract. She has no real world experience at all. Her only contact outside her family and immediate religious community is Noah, over the phone from two hundred and fifty miles away.

And, like any good Catholic girl, she is utterly consumed with guilt. She thinks that it was her fault that Noah was sent away, because she was scared and went into his room for comfort and that was when her parents found him with the magazine. Her mother wears a scapular and carries a rosary to remind her of her sin and to allow her to repent. She tells Sophie that she was raped as a college student by a parental substitute and it was her fault because she inadvertently tempted him. She sees beauty as a sin and womanhood as a burden. No wonder Sophie thinks that everything is her fault.

Meanwhile, in the dim and distant background, so far that Sophie hardly notices it, there's a new pandemic. NARS became NARS-CoV, a highly infectious strain of flu, and that mutated into Sylvia, so-called because it attacks the Sylvian Fissure in the brain and effectively turns its victims into a bunch of insatiable sex maniacs. Once you're infected, you're going lose all restraint and sexually assault anyone you see. It doesn't matter what gender you are (though men also get a red rash on their hands that women don't). It doesn't matter what gender they are. One man late in the book had starved to death after trying to rape his own reflection in a window.

And, after a stunning scene in which Sophie sees her strict Catholic parents, who devoutly believe that sex is God's mechanism to create children and absolutely nothing else, going at it like rabbits in their driveway in front of her and the neighbourhood, and then her father reaches for her as a second course, she jumps in the car and drives as far away as she can. In fact, she keeps on driving until the roads become blocked and suddenly she's in the middle of a pandemic she's heard little about. She's acutely unprepared for the world in general, let alone one falling apart like this, the northeast pretty much quarantined now and Sylvia spreading into the midwest where she lives.

There's an obvious path for this to take from here and, given what Leede did in 'Maeve Fly', it isn't much of a stretch to assume that she'll take it. However, she doesn't. There's certainly horror here but this is less of a horror novel and more apocalyptic road movie. Sophie is saved early by Officer Maro Verges, who's young and frustrated that all the people he's trying to save die anyway and so becomes driven to save one. Later they acquire Ben, a nascent crush from school; his friend Helen; an orphaned kid called Wyatt; Cleo, who's lost her husband to the virus; and, last but certainly not least, Barghest, a very large and very loyal dog. Together, they do their best to survive in a rapidly changing landscape.

Crucially, it's not just an episodic romp that could have run on for a whole series, as open ended as it becomes. There's serious depth here because of a number of excellent decisions by Leede.

Most obviously, having Sophie as the lead character is a blisteringly good choice. She's an innocent naïve young Catholic girl who's starting to mature without even realising it. She has no idea that her body is changing until a shopping trip to the mall because there are no full body mirrors in her house. She likes Ben and Ben seems to like her and she finds feelings for an increasing number of men around her but she has no idea what to do about any of it, as she's been conditioned that all that is sinful. That she's intelligent and well-read contrasts wonderfully with her poor grasp of the world at large. And, given where we go, her religious background becomes seriously challenged.

Leede has a huge amount to say about someone who escapes this sort of restricted upbringing. It may be well-meaning but it's inherently problematic at best and outright abusive at worst and it completely fails to equip children with the tools they need to survive outside their front door. And that applies all the more when a pandemic hits and the ultra-religious ignore it because God will take care of them. We're seeing this sort of thing in the news, parents locked up for neglect after they refuse life-saving medicine to their diabetic or epileptic children. This extrapolates further.

And, as much as that scene in Sophie's driveway is powerful, Leede reserves space for the really impactful scenes at the end. Sure, the time spent at the House on the Rock, also known as Frank Lloyd Wrong, is trippy and weird, but what Rev. Ansel and St. Michael's Crusaders get up to is the stuff of nightmares, most obviously given that fundamentalist Christian nationalists are taking over the United States right now and we're seeing pastors praise schools who rank at the lowest for vaccinations. If another pandemic hits similar to COVID-19, let alone Sylvia, who knows what these whackjobs would do. Maybe Rev. Ansel is out there right now and we just haven't heard his name on the news yet.

For all the social commentary, this is an adventure story, a horror story and a powerful vehicle for hope. Sure, there's plenty of sadness, incredibly well-written sadness that punches us in the gut a number of times, but whatever happens, Sophie is convinced that she's going to find Noah and her hope sustains us through the dark times the book has to offer. And, while this works as standalone material, there could easily be a sequel to take us on the next stage of her quest. If that's where she's going, it might become non fiction by the time she gets there. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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