The End of Everything

Fiction

Oct 11

About the book

Author: M. John Harrison
Publisher: Riverhead

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

Buy and support indie bookstores (+ I earn a small commission):
Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)

My review

Whew. Where do I even start?

I cannot emphasize this enough: This book is a really, REALLY weird post-apocalyptic fever dream that will slip through your fingers like water. I read it twice, each time in one sitting with the audio/print in tandem, and I am still not quite sure of anything. But I do have a solid appreciation for the fact that the WTF is the point, and that Harrison has made some capital-A Art, even though I’m sure I only grasped some of it.

We’re living in a time where real news headlines feel like either The Onion or a nightmare. The End of Everything takes that vibe and turns the volume up to 11 by treating the absurd, the uncanny, and the grotesque as blasé. But, like real life, there are also small moments of heartbreaking tenderness.

My advice is to be fully prepared to just go with the flow, even though as early as page 15 you will be wondering what you got yourself into. If you do, with the mindset that you are going to let yourself feel it instead of think it, there are so many different but (I think) equally valid lenses through which you can interpret the book. For me, probably because I live in the US and work in tech, the one that came across most strongly was AI. But could it just as easily be dementia? or art? or xenophobia? or the universe’s inevitable tendency toward entropy? (Oops, it’s actually all of them.)