If I want to track the decline of society, and some small areas that are attempting to stop it, I'll turn on the news. ( )

Set aside nine hours for this compelling PG near-future dystopian elegy for the dying city of North End. I ended up reading WAY past my bedtime as I simply could not put the book down. I won a hardback copy in a Goodreads giveaway and this is my voluntary review. ( )

I was in the mood for something apocalyptic. The unnamed city has been ravaged by climate change and chemical pollution. Animals are gone, plants don't grow. The people who remain are stunned and surviving as best they can. The narrator, also unnamed, is a reporter and photographer for the now abbreviated city paper. He explores different parts of the city, documenting its decline and the impending disaster of weakened levees nearby. In this way, he attempts to push away memories of his own tragic past.
Barnes' writing is beautifully spare and the story is almost relentlessly dreary, as you would expect of a poisoned world. There are also hopeful moments when people help each other and muster whatever shreds of dignity they have left to build something better. I would have appreciated more details of everyday life for these people, but that would have entailed the narrator interacting much more with those around him and he is intentionally solitary. So a different point of view maybe? But I did like it. ( )

Haunting ( )

I've read a lot of apocalypse books, beginning many years ago in junior high school with Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. In the last ten years I've acquired a collection of them, over 200 at last count. Many of them are older books that I simply didn't know about until I began looking for books in the genre. More current books present a dilemma, in that there are so many of them, not just stand alone books but series of 3, 5 or more, there are entire sub-genres like zombie apocalypse or supernatural-tinged apocalypse that don't interest me at all, and the sheer numbers make it all but impossible to tell a good book from something someone is cranking out in their basement, In short, there's a lot of crap out there, and I've become very careful about what I pay for . There are good books being written now, but they can get lost amid the trash. I bought this book because a "prequel" to it, Above the Ether, was offered as a $2 bargain ebook. That book was very deliberately paced, had many different characters and points of view, and didn't surprise me until the end. I felt it was good enough to take a chance on this book, so I bought a hardcover, which is still my preference. This book contains some of the same elements as the prequel, such as the deliberate pace, a sense of hopelessness, and vivid descriptions of the broken environment, but it has a single narrator--he's a writer and he writes stories and takes pictures for a small newspaper that's printed in what's left of his city. He has a past that haunts and wounds him, and that is slowly revealed, but it's his routine as a "reporter" that leads him out of his own prison and the prison of the city. It's a very quiet book, though there are violent things that happen. I was two months into Coronavisus quarantine when I read it, and somewhat alarmed by parallels between my current life and the narrators. Mostly I found him very sympathetic, tragic, and ultimately, the key to what happens to the city toward the end of the book. I don't want to spoil it, though it's hinted at in the blurbs on the dust jacket. If I have a negative criticism it would be that parts of the resolution are a little too giddy and seem exaggerated and abrupt, but the epilogue settles everything down again. The writing is spare and elegant, almost dreamlike, as the narrator, who doesn't like to speak out loud and doesn't always know when he has, finds his voice again. I think this is one of the best apocalypse books I've read in many years. It doesn't lecture about environmental issues it simply describes what has happened. and why. Highly recommended. ( )