Lost Everything

May 7, 2012
Acclaimed SF author Slattery's newest (after Liberation) chronicles two men's journey up the Susquehanna River and through an epically violent dystopian America. Sunny Jim and his friend Reverend Bauxite embark on their quest to locate Sunny Jim's lost son and wife before a nebulous, threatening storm ("the Big One") overtakes them. The ambiguity of the impending destruction is reminiscent of the calamity that preceded Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but Slattery's stream-of-consciousness style doesn't lend itself to effective pacing or moderationâdeath stains page after page, and the despair is so relentless it becomes uninteresting. Though there are moments of somber poetry (e.g., "the last echoes of voices all came together in a fading thrum"), the novel ultimately fails to do what McCarthy did so wellâto infuse a familiar landscape with enough light so the darkness stands out in relief. Slattery's dystopian U.S. is so bleak and heavy-handedly tragic, readers will likely tire of the trip long before the riverhead.

April 1, 2012
Slattery (Liberation, 2008, etc.), coeditor of The New Haven Review literary journal, produces a grim tale that takes place in a disaster-stricken, war-torn United States. The author presents an apocalyptic America in which storms have devastated cities and driven the country into civil war. A man named Sunny Jim travels up the Susquehanna River with a host of others on a ramshackle ship, in a seemingly hopeless quest to find his wife and son, and encounters horrors along the way. Slattery displays an affection for quoting song lyrics and includes plenty of underdeveloped characters with self-consciously wacky names (Reverend Bauxite, Grendel Jones and Judge Spleen Smiley, among others). Overall, the novel is rather humorless; death hangs over nearly every scene, with graphic descriptions of corpses scattered throughout. The end-of-times setting and ruminations on the power of family relationships are intriguing, but the novel is plagued by an unsatisfying, scattershot execution. An intriguing but ultimately unfocused novel.

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Starred review from April 15, 2012

As the world around them dissolves into chaos, the passengers aboard The Carthage travel up the Susquehanna River into the heart of an inexplicable war that pits American soldiers against desperate civilians and seasoned guerrilla fighters. For many years the climate has deteriorated, and now the Big One, a storm to end all storms, is moving across the land. In this dystopian future, two men journey toward their destiny. Reverend Bauxite seeks to validate his life through ministering to others, while Sunny Jim tries to reach his son and his wife, a guerrilla wanted for her terrorist actions. Pursued by soldiers with orders to kill them and tested by the casual violence of daily life in a debilitated world, the two companions learn that there is meaning in more than just survival. VERDICT This book calls to mind the starkness of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Narrated with a sense of quiet desperation and understated elegance, Slattery's (Spaceman Blues; Liberation) cautionary tale deserves a wide readership beyond dystopian sf fans.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.