Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

In the not-distant-enough future, a man takes a boat trip up the Susquehanna River with his most trusted friend, intent on reuniting with his son. But the man is pursued by an army, and his own harrowing past; and the familiar American landscape has been savaged by war and climate change until it is nearly unrecognizable.

Lost Everything is a stunning novel about family and faith, what we are afraid may come to be, and how to wring hope from hopelessness.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Apocalyptic, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 12, 2012

About the author

Editor, reporter, musician, and writer living just outside of New Haven, CT.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read 4/15/16 - 5/2/16
4 Stars - Strongly Recommend to readers with a love for the post-apocalyptic and with a load of patience
Pages: 304
Publisher: Tor Books
Released: 2012







Lost Everything takes its readers on a slow, sleepy crawl across the Susquehanna River in a not-so-distant post apocalyptic future where civil war and severe storms, brought about by economic hardships in the face of global warming, threaten to bring the country to its very knees and take the lives of anyone stupid enough to get caught up in between.

I've seen this book compared to McCarthy's The Road and Twain's Huckleberry Finn. And ok, sure, those are obvious choices, what with the mirrored elements of Cormac's sparse, dark storytelling and the whole two-guys-on-a-river-escaping-something-and-heading-towards-something-else-for-most-of-the-book thing, but where are the comparisons to Nevil Shute's On the Beach? I can't be the only one who sees a deeper connection to that one, can I?

You see, the novel follows recent widower and draft dodger Sunny Jim as he and his closest friend Reverend Bauxite travel north towards Binghamton, trying to outrun the war in an effort to reunite with his son and his sister before the Big One arrives.

The Big One looms ominously in the distance; a supposed storm of devastating proportions, rumored to wipe out everything in its path. Though Slattery never quite describes the storm itself, through the glimpses we are given, I envision it to be one of nuclear elements, and not so much one born of Mother Nature. I say this because our narrator - an unknown person who has survived these events and knew our protagonists and many of the other supporting characters well enough to relate their histories to us - appears to have met most of our guys after the event, and almost all of them are sick and dying. But sick with, or from, what? It's never clearly stated. So I might just totally be making shit up at this point. It's hard to say.

Then there's the whole Sunny Jim and Rev. B hitching a ride aboard the Carthage, a big steamboat that happens to be traveling in their direction, which is searching the waters and shores for survivors of the war, much like the submarine from On The Beach, whose captain also tours the waters from coast to coast searching for signs of life.

I also see similarities to OTB in many of the characters' nonchalance at facing the inevitable. In Shute's novel, the characters refuse to leave the comfort of their current lives, some even preferring to continue to work while others continue to shop for things like lawn chairs and groceries while listening to the radio as it gives updates on the radiation cloud that is making its way towards them. In a near mirror to that, our good ship Carthage runs into countless crowds at the shoreline - crowds of people who are not so much looking to escape as they are just searching for a way to kill the time until the end of the world comes to knock at their door.

So I started this review off by stating the book takes us on a slow, sleepy crawl up the river. And I mean that. Slattery is content taking his time, painting the picture in smooth, sweeping strokes, stopping every few feet to smell the half-dead roses and smoke-thickened air, before moving the story along again.

There are three distinct storylines within the novel - The River, The House, and The Highway. The River is where Sunny Jim and Rev. B are. The House is where Sunny Jim's son Aaron and sister Merry are, and is thus Jim's endgame. And The Highway is where the foot soldiers are, a small group of men who broke away from the main battle in an attempt to cut Jim off from his family.

There's a long span of time in which nothing really seems to happen. And at first it was frustrating for me, but eventually I realized it was necessary, that it was alright, because our three splintered story lines needed to cover some ground before they began converging on one another. And converge they do!

Lost Everything is what's left when everything else has been taken. It's what drives a person to continue to fight for their lives when there is really nothing left to live for. It is a powerful and persuasive second look at what might be most important to us. It forces you to reevaluate what you would take with you when you can't take it all. And it pushes you to look at those you love in a painfully new light.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lost Everything is like Cormac McCarthy's The Road if written by Terrence Malick. So stark and bleak yet so...ethereal. I loved it when I was done, even though getting to the end was a struggle at times. The primary story, about a pair of men floating up the now-mighty Susquehanna River during an unspecified war in the near future to find a lost son, is riveting. But every single character introduced gets a backstory, with tangents and diversions and unexplained details, to the point that the main plot is almost a non-factor. Slattery somehow fleshes out the entire world while still keeping everything vague. The whole reading experience was exactly like those last 5 minutes before you fall fast asleep. You aren't quite dreaming, but you aren't quite awake.

[Marc Gerstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is brutal and I couldn’t get all the way through it, but I get what the author is trying to do. It doesn’t work and I don’t think it’s possible to work, but I’ll respect the creative risk enough not to give it one star.

To say this is a dystopian or apocalyptic work is an understatement. The story, if you want to call it a story, features protagonist Sunny Jim and his friend Reverend Bauxite traveling along with many others up the Susquehanna River to get his son and wife. The setting is the war ravaged US. Other reviewers compared the structure of this work to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I didn’t read that; to me, it had a Heart of Darkness feel to it.

Even positive reviews mention the unyielding bleakness of the work and the absence of any relief at all. I agree with that assessment, but I think the book’s supporters underestimate the extent of this shortcoming. One-note does’t work in any art form. A painting with all highlights or all accents wouldn’t work. A musical composition that never strays from the a single theme wouldn’t work. Cusine that’s excessively seasoned, even with a well-chosen seasoning, wouldn’t work. No matter how creative one is, there are some principals that simply have to be respected if one is to produce something that succeeds. Slattery missed. He gives us one note; all gloom.

But I think what really drives this work is its having been miscast as a novel in the first place. It should not have been a novel, it should not have been a poem, a play, a film, or even a musical piece. All of those art forms, however they may differ, share a vital element. They are sequential. Accordingly, what is presented at one point should either introduce the rest (if it’s the beginning) or build on what came before and drive the work to what comes next (unless its the end). An artist can play a lot with the sequence and defy expectations and we see that all the time. But even an artist who chooses to defy expectations about a sequence is still, somehow, addressing it.

Slattery does not address the sequential nature of the art form he chose. Nothing is built and there is no sense of reason or three-dimensionality to any character or situation (or if there is, it happened too late in the book for me to have noticed and that’s a bad one on the author).

I get what he wants to present, but it should have been a paining, a mural or a sculpture or something like that, something non sequential. As I tried to plow through however much I got through, I kept thinking of Picasso’s Guernica, or some of the giant apocalyptic paintings of Joe Catuccio, an artist I doubt many have heard of but who was well known in the Soho (Manhattan) art world pre-gentrification. That is the operating model that would have worked for Slattery.

I get that Slattery is a writer, not a painter. Too bad. We all are who we are and are at our best when we work within our own talents. There are lots of things I wish I could do but which are outside my capabilities. I get it. Slattery didn’t when he wrote this.

[zxvasdf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mexico native Alfonso Cuarón directed the cinematic adaptation of PD James's Children of Men. I couldn't understand what I loved about this movie. I watched it again. Then I watched Yu tu Mama Tambien. Then I understood. Cuarón's consummate skill is in telling the story of the world outside that of the protagonist's perspective, effectively reducing the landscape into a vital character of the narrative. His camera wanders, and the world slides by, telling its story merely by being framed.

The same is true for Brian Francis Slattery, our post-apocalyptic prophet bard. He is a literary phenomenon, tearing the world apart three different ways in his three books. If Spaceman Blues and Liberation were sweet jazz riffs, Lost Everything is a mournful bluegrass rendition. While Harlan Ellison complimented the author so eloquently in a blurb to Spaceman Blues—a breathless, mad tornado of words!—this book is a river, very much like the river traveled by Sunny Jim and his relentless friend the Reverend Bauxite.

A purposeless war, burning its way into upstate New York, is being fought by people who don't know how to do anything else, and to the west of the Appalachian mountains is the hand of God, an inexorable storm that has reduced most of continental America to kindling. Beating against the east is the hopeless sea. The achievements of man, the history of his mistakes are being stripped of meaning by the dual violence of nature and human nature. America has lost everything, its peoples reduced to the clothes on their back and an incomprehensible but all too human need to survive. The world is full of ghosts, very real even if they only exist as a storm of neurons.

Critics have said Slattery's overused the decay and destruction in his book. I disagree. It is like ruin photography, of houses sagging, a spray of broken bottleglass on a derelict street, the flaking rust of an abandoned car. There is beauty in it. Slattery invites us to smell, feel, and see his world as he sees it. He says it isn't a bad thing, man, to fall apart. It only strengthens us, brings us together. Helps us find meaning in our life that we've forgotten in our mad dash for material gain. He reminds us of this as ruins of our folly lie around us and says hey, our children are being born into a world where they will never know what we've lost.

Lost Everything is about the self-annihilating love a parent has for a child, the lengths we go to preserve that legacy. Sunny Jim is a plot device, a vector of bursting love scrambling to rescue his son, to be with his son, to be together, before the monster storm overtakes the world as they know it. The Reverend Bauxite is also possessed by paternal love of the boy, and is yet another character thrown into the mix by Slattery's love of placing people in transposed roles; while the father and reverend protect the son as father and father, the mother is out fighting in a war populated mostly by females. Their love demands sacrifice, and the blood runs at the altar.

It is a song of destruction and love and hope, sweeping along a river that floods plains and overruns borders, carves mountains, transfigures map. It is a story of pain, but beautiful pain that you'll be long in forgetting.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another Goodreads reviewer described the book as bleak but ethereal, and I have to agree. This is post-apocalyptic fiction, but there are many poetic passages in the book. The story is slow and very character-centric, with alot of backstory as people appear in the plot. It's more literary fiction than genre fiction, and I was in the right mood to read this. I didn't hurry in reading it, and just let myself experience it. I guess you could sort of compare it to The Road, but it wasn't nearly as harsh and it left you with a more hopeful ending.

[Shaun Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewing Slattery's Lost Everything will seem rather convenient in light of Elizabeth Bear's Clarkesworld post on the doom and gloom nature of SF. How awful of me to love another work that makes us all sad and boo hoo inside! Except Lost Everything isn't terribly boo hoo, unless the only thing you pay attention to is the central premise: the United States has gone to pot -- global collapse, climate change, and civil war, along with the looming threat of an immense, monstrous storm that will supposedly destroy everything.

But underneath that dark premise is something that I think the best SF always draws out: the pure wonder of the human condition. The novel follows a diverse cast of characters from different and sometimes opposing backgrounds: Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim, who have set off together to retrieve Jim's son, Aaron, and escape the Big One (a massive, deadly storm weaving in from the west); Sergeant Foote, who has been tasked with hunting down Bauxite and Jim to determine if
they're a threat against the military, and neutralize that threat if necessary; Faisal Jenkins, captain of the Carthage, who wants to ferry people down the river to safety and listens to the river for the day when it will consume him and his ship; and an eclectic mix of secondary characters, from a con artist to a ship's first and second mates to military men and resistance fighters, all searching for a sense of home, a sense of who they were and who they have become, and a sense of what it means to have lost everything but not the will to find it all again.

Lost Everything is about survival, of adapting to dangerous situations and finding a way to still find love, friendship, companionship, trust, and all those things that have helped us form a civilization. It's about faith, not just in a higher power, but in fellow man. There is something profoundly optimistic about finding these human elements in a time that seems to have no future. We're conditioned to assume the worst of humanity at the end of days. Our movies tell us that we can't trust anyone, that any one of them could sell us up the river. But Lost Everything reminds us of the beautiful nature of human interaction: that even in the darkest of times, the best of what makes us human springs forward. Optimism at its finest, and handled by Slattery with simple, but beautiful prose and through a narrative that collapses the past and present to show us who people were and who they have become.

Slattery's narrative structure amplifies this thematic content. Split largely between three spaces -- the house, the river, and the highway (iconic spaces in American literature from Twain to Kerouac and so on) -- Slattery moves seamlessly between a character's past and present, doing so in a way that perhaps seems tedious at first, but quickly lifts the veil to reveal the purpose. Each storyline moves towards a similar idea, albeit expressed through a variety of hopes and dreams (finding family here, discovering home there, and so on). The result is a narrative that snakes its way like a river towards an "future" that, as the narrative reminds us, has already happened, and which we're being shown so we know what kinds of people lived before, and the kinds of people that have been left behind. The structure might jar some readers, but I found it refreshing. Whereas many SF novels follow the now-traditional conventions of plot, Lost Everything evades all of that, perhaps to explore characters in ways traditional writing makes unavailable, or to simply break apart the notion that there is anything like a stable narrative when humanity's connection to place has been ruptured. Call it postmodern or literary; whatever it is, I found myself hooked not just by the characters, but by these very structural choices.

Perhaps these stylistic and narrative choices are why some have compared this novel to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, though it seems to me that the comparison rests primarily on theme. Slattery is not Cormac McCarthy. Nor is he Mark Twain. He is something else entirely -- a unique voice in genre who transcends generic tradition entirely, who pulls up the roots of the ancient and the new, plucks them from the tree of knowledge itself and weaves them into twisted creations which never forget that we are dealing with human beings in terrible situations. While Spaceman Blues adapted the Orpheus myth to the landscape of a city beset with conspiratorial sensawunda, Lost Everything draws upon a long history of river novels, river myths, and river tropes to remind us of how humanity adapts to an uncontrollable natural world and a species struggling with its compulsive nature, with its unchecked neuroses.

In other words: this is a novel that will haunt me for years to come. Its mark will never go away. For that reason alone, Lost Everything will sit at the top of my list of WISB Award hopefuls. And it will take a herculean effort of literary genius to strip this book of its place as the best novel of the year.

[Brad Hodges · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's yet another book about the collapse of society following some sort of calamity, but instead of nuclear war it's the rising tides caused by global warming. I read Lost Everything, by Brian Francis Slattery, because it won some award, but I didn't find it award-worthy. It's a dull, dreary book that I soldiered through, much like the characters as they fight for survival.

Set in the Susquehanna River valley, the book focuses on disparate characters. The rising of the oceans seems to have dissolved life as they knew it. "The ocean knocking on the door, about to let itself in. It took maybe seventy years. A growing beat, they say, of stronger and stronger storms, a long chain of hurricanes, until the walls gave way and the streets went under, buildings fell. Savannah. Atlantic City. A freak storm in Boston. A ragged swath carved out in New York. the remaining cities cringing with every change of season, every gathering of clouds, waiting for the Big One."

The Big One is an approaching storm from the west that is rumored will wipe out everything. But meanwhile there's a war going on--the military versus a resistance movement, but it escaped me what the causes of the conflict were.

The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator who relates most of this second-hand, which is an off-putting and frustrating approach. We get multiple viewpoints, the most prominent a man called Sunny Jim and his friend, a minister named Reverend Bauxite. They are headed up the Susquehanna to get to Jim's son in Binghamton, New York, where he is housed with his sister, Merry. Jim's wife was a rebel who died in a suicide bombing of a bridge. So we get a kind of Huckleberry Finn river story, as the two board a ship, the Carthage (that it is named for a fallen civilization is surely not a coincidence) that has a variety of other passengers.

We also get the viewpoint of some soldiers as they move across Pennsylvania, including one, Sergeant Foote, who has gone undercover on the Carthage, looking for Sunny Jim. She ends up in a relatioship with an unnamed con artist.

The writing is spare and grim, and full of incomplete sentences, which annoyed me. I didn't really care about any of the characters, and found much of the book unpleasant. There are some vivid descriptions of freak violence, such as this one: "He was driving a decades-old sedan on the back road from Lisle to the highway, found the animal standing in the middle of the road after midnight. He laid on the horn, jammed the brakes, and the deer turned toward him, charged the car. The first hoof put a tight, deep dent in the hood. The next went through the windshield, through the driver's skull. Then the deer was up and over the roof, down the other side, and Mr. Dave was leaning back in his seat, mouth open, eyes staring upward. Hands draped over the wheel. The car went another twenty yards, then listed left and rocked to a gentle stop on the side of the road."

That has some good writing in it, which Lost Everything could have used more of.

[Gerhard · Rating 2 out of 5]

On p35, the unnamed narrator remarks: “There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens.” Except the problem with Lost Everything is precisely the opposite: there are too many words here. A brimful cornucopia of imagery that overwhelms the reader, with writing so lush and overripe that the very pages seem to shimmer and curl. It reminded me of JG Ballard and Ian McDonald. However, the richness of the writing distanced me from the characters, as I was too conscious of Slattery’s literary pyrotechnics to feel an emotional connection to anything. And then there is the tone, with scenes of quite appalling violence nestling uncomfortably with magical realist whimsy. It just does not hold together; the centre falls apart.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brian Francis Slattery, look, I love you, but your all sweeping description of looking out over the landscape of America like some kind of Kerouac-slash-Steinbeck all the time no real plot development to speak of oh wait what the fuck that was the ending shtick is going to get old eventually. EVENTUALLY.

[Jan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea why anyone would want to read this book, or find it an engrossing read as some readers have here on goodreads. Yet, I read it, didn't I? Well, not exactly by choice. It was the only book my partner and I could find that met most of the criteria for this month's YA blind date buddy read challenge. To say it depressed the heck out of me is an understatement. It seemed that every other page had bodies floating in the river or lining the sides of the roads with a bullet in the back of their head. And those were the ones that actually looked like bodies, and not just body parts. Sometimes It was a whole colony of people who had given up because the future was just too bleak and had done a mass suicide with poison. It just went on and on like this for the whole book. No hope, just despair. I really need to find a happy book now, preferably something with a big silly dog.

[Terry Weyna · Rating 3 out of 5]

What will happen to America as the effects of global warming continue to wreak havoc? Brian Francis Slattery imagines a much different country in Lost Everything, which has been nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award for 2012 for the best paperback original novel.

Slattery imagines that the country we know as the United States is gone, replaced by smaller, regional countries that are engaged in civil war. The Susquehanna River Valley is in the middle of such a war, about which we are told little save that it is ravaging the land and the people. Sunny Jim has lost his wife Aline to the war — not as a victim, but as a saboteur who died by her own bomb. Down the Susquehanna paddle Sunny Jim and the Reverend Bauxite, for Sunny Jim refuses to fight. They are trying to reach Sunny Jim’s sister and his son. They must do so quickly, before the Big One hits — a storm so severe that it leaves nothing in its wake at all:

"Just a boiling wall of clouds, gray and green and sparked with red lightning, and underneath it, a curtain of flying black rain, rippling with wild wind from one end of the earth to the other… I watched it take a town in the valley, far away below, and it was as though a wave were rolling across the ground, lifting houses, roads, trees, and all — anything that was still there — up into the air, into the mouth of the storm."

Along the banks of the river are communities that have suffered from both flooding and the war. Sandbags are piled to keep the river back, but over them the boaters can see smoke from gasoline fires and hear grieving families wailing over their dead. Some days the river banks instead offer markets, capitalism rising from the ashes. But soldiers swarm over the markets, and Jim and the Reverend are wary of getting on the highway instead of sticking to the river. When they hear about the Carthage, a ferryboat headed up the river, though, they decide to take the risk of going overland long enough to catch the boat.

The Carthage is a traveling menagerie: horses, camels, cows, birds, monkeys all over the deck. It’s full of people, too, with a band playing belowdecks, squeezing out room among the heavy furniture, the fabric, all the belongings of those who have taken to the river. The captain agrees to take Sunny Jim because she knew his wife, long before she met Sunny Jim.

And so this peculiar book hits its stride, telling of the adventures of those on the boat as it heads upriver. The parallels to Mark Twain’s masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, are unmistakable: both books depict people escaping unbearable conditions (slavery for Twain’s Jim, drafting into the army for Slattery’s Sunny Jim) and using a river for their travel. But there are also differences: Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite travel north, not south; they ride against the current instead of with it; and they are passengers on a riverboat with the company of others, not a raft by themselves. Despite the violence both behind and before the travelers, the book is oddly quiet and elegiacal, a mourning for the loss of a better world and an inability to see any future. Indeed, the only future possible seems to be one of the world starting over once the Big One has scrubbed the face of the earth clean.

It’s easy to see why the Philip K. Dick Award judges’ panel chose Lost Everything. The book has a lot of strangeness to it, even in the manner in which it is told (there is a first person narrator who appears every now and then to address the readers directly for a few paragraphs, without us ever finding out much about this individual or how he or she fits into the story). And it is beautifully written, with vivid descriptions of people, places, weather, and horrific violence. But while I appreciate this book, I do not like it. The characters are not very likeable or particularly interesting. Despite the war, the river, the weather, little happens, and nothing is resolved. Perhaps Slattery was seeking to write a meditation on T.S. Eliot’s famous concluding line to “The Hollow Men,” in which the world ends “not with a bang, but a whimper.” In the end, what I’m left with is an appreciation of Slattery’s talent, and a hope that his next book will be more to my liking.

Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The war, the war. There was no Fort Sumter, no Pearl Harbor, no moment that we all understood at once that we were fighting. No one to tell us things had changed. There must have been a first shot fired, perhaps two men—it must have been men—arguing over where one’s land began and another’s ended, a first bullet flinging a ribbon of heat through the air. Another one shot back. But I have to believe they did not know what they were starting. If they knew, why would they have shot? An army was raised, a resistance arose. By the time Charlotte, North Carolina burned, nobody was asking what it was about anymore. It was about territory. It was about food and water: who had it, who did not. The old fights, the ones we had fought since we got here, the ones our ancestors brought with them when they came here, all those bitter old things becoming new again. it was about how much we had done to the planet, and the way the planet, at last, had turned its great eye to us in anger. You have done enough. The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.

***

A little bit of McCarthy’s The Road married to the Ship of Lost Souls segment from the “Kidney Trouble” episode of The Simpsons, Brian Francis Slattery’s Lost Everything is a soft-focus post-apocalyptic journey north through the Susquehanna River and a war- and nature-destroyed vision of America. Focusing on the relationship between Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim, who seeks only to be reunited with his lost son Aaron, Lost Everything is, given its subject matter, a surprisingly quiet, introspective tale detailing less the actions that led to America’s downfall, and more the prevailing moods—anger, resentment, suspicion—that have since dominated.

Alluding only to a far-reaching, almost faction-less war, and an accompanying onslaught of vicious end-of-the-world-style storms, Lost Everything offers more melancholy and ambiance than plot, and it is all the stronger for it. The Carthage, the ship that ferries its wayward crew and passengers north, is the most identifiable protagonist—a skeletal, almost Galactica-esque vessel whose time and purpose is limited in a world no longer certain to survive beyond the end of the week, let alone years and decades into the future. The vessel-as-purgatory conceit is nothing particularly new, but it offers Slattery, via an unnamed omniscient narrator who doubles as a chronicling spirit of sorts, the opportunity to open windows into the destruction of his America via small, intimate pockets of death and misery. At times the book feels like a series of side stories to larger narratives, as if their journey north is taking the multitude of lost individuals aboard the Carthage through the tales of families and lives not covered in the main stories of The Road, or The Hunger Games.

Though Slattery’s lack of detail and concrete explanations may frustrate some, I found this restraint incredibly effective at conveying and sustaining an overwhelming and realistic sense of unease. The factions in his war and what they do or do not stand for is irrelevant; the nature of the storms on continuous deadly approach—be they biblical in origin or the result of severe nuclear fallout—does not matter. It is the never-ending sense of conflict and the strength by which the various external crises mirror the internal demons of the Carthage’s passengers and crew that gives Lost Everything its due gravitas.

I was surprised at how drawn in I was by the end of this book. On paper, it’s presented as a rather conventional post-apocalyptic narrative. However, Slattery’s employment of subtlety and restraint prevents Lost Everything from being boiled down to its barest essentials. Highly recommended.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Brian Francis Slattery is an established Science Fiction author, I would place this apocalyptic novel somewhere between Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Set in a not-too-distant future, two or three generations at most, global warming has brought the United States into a drought-fueled civil war between government forces and a revolutionary army. Amidst this violent and blighted backdrop, Slattery follows Sunny Jim and his preacher friend Reverend Bauxite as they travel north through New York State and Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna River, in the direction of an oncoming nuclear cloud, to fetch Jim’s son Aaron from Jim’s family home and flee south before the storm overtakes them.

While Jim and Reverend Bauxite rush north, they meet others both fleeing the storm and traveling towards it in an attempt to return home before the end. Bouncing between three locations: The river, the highway and the house, we meet soldiers who are fighting the revolutionaries even though they can’t remember why, teenagers falling in love amidst the devastation, mothers trying to protect their children and crewmen on the vessel carrying Jim and the reverend whose last duty is to bring their passengers as far as they can go. We hear all the different life stories and varying personal experiences—crimes committed, loved ones lost and moments of redemption—of all these people who face the same unknown.

While the story does depict the future of our worst nightmares, a sense of optimism shines through. Jim and the Reverend are trying to protect family and innocence. And while the people we meet certainly show intense cruelty, there are also moments of profound kindness, small, but powerful gestures of love and a great sense of hope overriding hopelessness.

“Lost Everything” honors the human condition of adaptation and unity, and defends the notion that despite the worst, many people can and do maintain their dignity. This story is theme- and character-driven more than it is driven by plot, so if you’re looking for something to get lost in on the beach, it may not be the right choice. But if you’re looking to curl up in a quiet corner with a book that will touch a nerve and reveal light in the darkness, I highly recommend this novel.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vastly superior to Cormac McCarthy's over-hyped and over-rated "The Road", Lost Everything is a strange, fey, elegiac tale set in a not-distant-enough future America ravaged by climate change, economic collapse, and civil war. Sunny Jim, a taciturn man with a violent and troubled past, undertakes a journey up the flooded Susquehanna River valley on a mission to collect his son Aaron, whom he left in the charge of his wild, animistic sister Merry. Accompanying him on the journey is Reverend Bauxite, Jim's only friend; but also a man with hidden traumas and deep griefs that lie close to his heart. Pursued by the ghosts of their respective pasts - in Jim's case, the memories of his recently dead wife Aline, as well as the phantoms of three young men he killed while protecting Merry - the pair are also pursued by soldiers and agents of the occupying army, who have orders to execute them on charges of murder and espionage. But hanging over them all is news from the west and north that the "Big One" - the final, obliterating storm that is the end product of all of humanity's environmental abuses - is closing in fast....

Moving, disturbing, by turns powerful and provocative, this haunting tale of humanity's end times is nonetheless a searching meditation on hope and resilience, and how the light of compassion can illuminate even the darkest reaches of the human heart. Highly recommended.

[Cameluta · Rating 4 out of 5]

***I was lucky to win an advance copy of this book from tor.com.***

This was a very good book, well written, with very realistic characters. You fell the war destruction, and the characters' struggling in every word. The reason I didn't give the book five stars is because it was so depressing (but this made it so realistic). I had to stop reading several times - it was just too much suffering and destruction.

[Edwina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still reading. Everything is going to pot, I'm told who will live, who will die. I might be told how this happens. I don't count on it. I don't know who's talking. Is it death? But no. Death wouldn't feed people, just take them away. I'll keep reading to the end. I won't recommend it.

I keep imagining little squiggly lines under the clauses that are sentences without verbs. Very distracting.

I think I'd like to read his other books. Later. Not soon.

[Tobias · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Slattery's 'Liberation,' and was hoping this novel would be just as good. I was very disappointed. He's an excellent writer, but this novel went nowhere - like McCarthy's 'The Road' but with an uneven, disjointed plot. As in the case of 'The Road,' Slattery offers no specifics as to how the world was ruined, just handwaving in the direction of climate change. What was so great about 'Liberation' was his ability to bring a social scientist's eye to the genre.

[First Second Books]

I love how in this book there’s the apocalypse – but it’s not filled with zombies, nuclear explosions, or Revelations. Instead, it’s just moderately-quietly concluding, in a kind of ‘fade to white as the sky opens up like an orange’ sort of deal.

Also I love how the protagonists in this ‘we have to go and get this kid home safely to his parents’ story are men, because the relevant women in their lives are busy fighting wars and are not available for kid-wrangling today.

[Marci Glasgow-Haire · Rating 2 out of 5]

The voice was jumbled, disjointed; the story bleak (as, of course, apocalyptic stories are meant to be) and climate-change-preachy. A little more cohesion to the narrative would've made for a much better book. Heck, even an introduction to the narrator would've gone a long way.

I'm being generous with the two stars. It probably only deserves 1.5. Don't waste your time.

[Mere Hruby · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only finished the book because I paid for it. The characters were flat as well as the plot line. If it was supposed to be a story of the journey one would think the journey would have contained a revelation of self or the world... No such luck. The conclusion made me think, "Really. ALL that for this?". It was definitely not satisfying.

[Cameron · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too dreamy, too many shifts of perspective and time, too few context clues. Some pretty big holes in the setting as well - for example: it would take a lot longer than 100 years for climate change to turn North America into a tropical jungle.

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do not waste time on this book! The author may have a gift for describing the new ways of the steamy and rotten planet Earth but his plot was thin and characters not believable.

[Donovan Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

No One Should Be Mother Teresa

I vaguely remember a provocative paper assigned in ethics during my undergraduate years. Since I forget specifics, it’s probably not the best analogy, but I find it particularly fits with Brian Francis Slattery’s Lost Everything.

The author of this paper argued that nobody should aim to act like Mother Teresa. First off, the baseline for her code of ethics is too high for most of humanity to reach. Additionally, people can’t relate to the Mother Teresa-types of this world. In their perfect altruism, they alienate everyone else. Could you find yourself able to use sarcasm in front of her? It would seem as if you couldn’t be yourself for fear of judgment or feelings of insufficiency.

Ethically then, the author argues for a more nuanced approach which allows people to remain in relationship with others. To be human, essentially. To me, this idea sits at the core of Lost Everything.

Traversing a Post-Apocalyptic Landscape

Told through an anonymous narrator in a documentary style, Lost Everything follows its principal characters, Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite, as they meander up the bloated Susquehanna River in the reconstructed steam engine, Carthage. Living in a dreary post-apocalyptic version of the United States, the duo hopes to reunite with Sunny Jim’s son, Aaron, before the war catches up with them. Aaron is staying with Jim’s sister, taking refuge in the old family house away from the warfront.

Meanwhile, on what’s left of the former Interstate 81, the army marches toward this house, hoping to capture the targeted Sunny Jim dead or alive—but in all honesty, and most likely, dead.

A Nation Collapsed

While Brian Francis Slattery superbly crafts a touching and suspenseful narrative, this novel shines during its frightening descriptions of the United States in post-collapse.

Trouble starts with the climate. With harsh storms comes economic hardship and soon, a once prosperous nation dives into a depraved civil war.

“It was about territory. It was about food and water: who had it, who did not. The old fights, the ones we had fought since we got here, the ones our ancestors brought with them when they came here, all those bitter old things becoming new again. It was about how much we had done to the planet, and the way the planet, at last, had turned its great eye to us in anger. You have done enough. The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it” (33).

Signifying this shift to full-scale warfare, the symbols of success in the past now senesce toward full decay.

“Passed City Island, the flooded marina. The stadium overgrown with trees and split by shells. The baseball field now a cratered forest. Depressions filled with water from the rain, the river pushing out of the ground, flooding the roots of monumental maples. The whole place, the whole city, going under, for too much at last had been asked for it” (13).

A stadium, the representation of leisure and recreation, is now part of the wild. Slattery also illustrates this point when Sunny Him and Reverend Bauxite take shelter on a run-down Three Mile Island.

What Are We Fighting For?

Additionally, in this near-future state, the war has ravaged the nation and the lines between enemy and friend have blurred irreversibly. Towns have been slaughtered or, worse, moldering toward starvation. People continue to fight but for a purpose quickly fading.

“They both fought for family killed, land lost, farms razed and houses burned to ash. For animals butchered in the road. For cities brought to ruin. They were one step away from each other, the soldiers and the guerrillas, one side fighting to keep the small things they had left, the other fighting because they had already lost them” (107).

A Fragile Faith

While the setting and context shine in Lost Everything, I also felt drawn to Sunny Jim’s sidekick and best friend, Reverend Bauxite. Much like Mel Gibson’s character in Signs, Reverend Bauxite encounters an existential crisis of faith. With so much destruction, suffering, and death, Reverend Bauxite no longer carries certainty around his faith as if he comprehends the mysteries of the world.

“But there had been too much death, too many people blown to pieces in the street. Too many people he loved were gone for him to believe that faith demanded he abide it” (129).

In fact, Slattery makes connections between faith and suffering throughout the novel. Thematically dominant, the idea of atonement for the sins of humanity emerges often. Humanity, for too long, consumed without question like a ravenous pig in the slop. Humanity, for too long, discarded goods uncritically, like a spoiled child at Christmas.

“Perhaps questions of faith and questions of what we had done to the planet had always been converging. Both had their deniers, people who claimed no responsibility. Things just happen, they said. But among the faithful—those who had seen enough evidence to believe that things happened for a reason, and the we were part of it—there was a sense of having sinned, and of there being a reckoning for those sins” (128).

Under the burden of such sin, isn’t collapse deserved?

It Is Better to Be Human

Given such horror depicted in Lost Everything, I believe Reverend Bauxite exemplifies the strongest character in the novel. While many of faith lean toward the cliché in times of crisis, Reverend Bauxite settles for realism. Consider this example where the Reverend encounters another gruesome scene of death and destruction:

“Reverend Bauxite tried to be holy, decided it was better to be human. God damn it, he thought. God damn it. Then he was saying it out loud, louder and louder, until the crest of his anger passed, though he knew another was coming” (159).

Much like that author I read in college and the premise about Mother Teresa, if only we could all decide to be a little less holy and a little more human. Lost Everything conjures a concept of post-collapsed America. All good things must end and that includes prosperity of the United States of America. Brian Francis Slattery depicts this era in striking horror. May we all try to be more like Reverend Bauxite, assessing scenarios for what they are, and reacting as humans, because someday—hopefully many years in the future—the United States will face the unthinkable and collapse.

If you like the post-apocalyptic genre, Lost Everything is a must read. Evocative and tragic, Brain Francis Slattery has created a world with which we all should become acquainted.

Originally published at http://www.wherepenmeetspaper.com

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a beautiful book with a consistent languid desperate tone that seeps into you overtime like drizzle. I appreciated the structure of the book but wasn't a fan of how the narrator was supposedly relating the story. It never really made sense to me, but this isn't a book that wants to give you sense. It wants to give you a feeling and sort of shrugs at the details. Unfortunately, for the amount of time that the mood is established, I simply didn't get enough feels out of it. The characters (very) slowly reveal themselves and how they grapple with loss, meaning, and a graceful death, but I think the slow tone of the book could have been interrupted with jolts of intensity that woke the reader up and slapped them around a little. I was waiting for something much more impactful that never came.

[tartaruga fechada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manufactured Trilogy #27: 10,000 Ways the Climate Collapses
- Lost Everything (Slattery)
- The Bear (Krivak)
- The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Flanagan)
++ The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (Elison)

"We burned and we burned, until there was more smoke than fuel, and then things started to come apart. The roads breaking into rifts of jutting asphalt. Libraries with caved-in roofs, full of decaying books and dead monitors. We saw these things and yelled at each other. The system had been built on argument, believing that any problem could be fixed, explained, weaseled out of, with enough money, the right words. Until the problem was physics, and then there was only what we did and how the planet responded. It did not matter what we said after that, though we kept talking anyway. As if it was all we had."

"They will not say it, but they cannot keep it all in either. For their coming children are their hopes embodied, their faith made flesh, that all that is ending is beginning again. For the world will not be fallen to their children. It will only be the world, new as they are. And perhaps if we tell them enough, if we say the right thing, they will see a way out, and know what to do."

"They were on the long arm of Appalachia, its shoulder in Georgia, its fingers buried somewhere under the miles of pines stretching to the Canadian border. The people that lived on it had always been hidden, were always disappearing. Towns and cities vanishing under collapsing mountains, rising rivers. All those houses at the bottoms of reservoirs. Porches and living rooms thick with muck and algae. A brood of snapping turtles lumbering across the dining room floor. A school of perch shimmering up the stairs. Curtains wafting in the current through the open windows, as if blown by a subtle breeze. This thing that scares us so much, they lived with it for generations. The land rejecting them, the rivers coming to get them. Their kids covered in black dust, sliding into holes in the ground and never coming out. They saw all of this coming, put it in their songs, songs with thin stabbing voices, melodies angled like broken glass. They tried to tell us that what had happened to them would happen to us, too, but we could not hear the message. Mistook it for nostalgia, when they were speaking prophesy."

[melissa6344a17]

Dans une Amérique postapocalyptique, deux hommes, Sunny Jim et le révérend Bauxite, s’arment de courage et partent à bord d’un navire délabré sur le long de la rivière Susquehanna dans le but de retrouver le fils et la femme du premier. Dans ce monde empreint de noirceur, dévasté par les tempêtes, la guerre et les changements climatiques, la mort n’est jamais loin. Pourchassés par des soldats et « the Big One », une tempête comme ils n’en ont jamais vu, les deux protagonistes réussiront-ils leur quête ? Un livre brutal, violent, qui suscitera la réflexion à coup sûr.

[Martin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Francis Slattery is the master of painting pictures with his words. His descriptions are more than just merely poetic. He transports you into the scene and into the minds of his characters with such vivid clarity, it's almost uncanny. I will say that this book is packed with exposition, almost to the detriment of a coherent plot progression. But I can easily forgive that given the sincerity of every word used. It was simply a beautiful experience

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hm. How to talk about this book. It took me an entire month to read it, versus the way I devoured the two previous ones. It moves at a very sedate and languid pace, mimicking the Susquehanna River where all of the action is set -- like a sort of meandering sepia-toned post-apocalyptic Heart of Darkness. Another reader described this book as that "those last 5 minutes before you fall fast asleep", and Slattery mentioned that that was the exact hazy time of day in which he wrote the first draft.

Which is great, but not really my cup of tea. There's a fractured, fragmented style throughout, in which sentences lack verbs and are simply just description description description of what's around for the eye to see -- which was a incredibly distracting literary technique, and I'm not sure I ever recovered enough to stop noticing it or thinking it was conspicuous. I really missed the frenetic pace and plotting of Liberation; there are still recognisable Slattery-themes here such as Nature's retribution, environmental cataclysm, survival after apocalypse, patchwork society, music and camaraderie, but it was an incredibly languid (I can't get away from that word) way of exploring it. I think Liberation is the stronger book; faster, better characters, better-paced. Lost Everything is sentimental but leaves things dangling -- like the mysterious narrator, who you never find anything about but who is chronicling human memory and experience for posterity, and I couldn't decide whether or not I loved the narrator or hated it.

There's a nice constant theme do with parenthood and children, though, which I really liked; there's a good passage about how the adults are miserable in the post-apocalypse because they know what they've lost, but the children are basically bright gleaming balls of hope because this is all they've ever known, so they're happy with it, they can see the beauty in it and hopefully build something better. Which would be so true. Constant little nods to trying to preserve the world, somehow, in order to leave a better place for our children despite the fact that we've broken it. Those were the themes that got me most.

Anyway. Slattery says that his trio of post-apocalyptic vistas are done now and that he's finally moving on to something new, so I'm v. curious to see where he goes next! Still love his writing, even though with such similar settings to them, I much preferred Liberation over this.

Sidenote: Merry was my favourite character. Man, she was the best.

As per usual, a huge load of my favourite excerpts follow, just in terms of being beautiful passages:

It was about territory. It was about food and water: who had it, who did not. The old fights, the ones we had fought since we got here, the ones our ancestors brought with them when they came here, all those bitter old things becoming new again. It was about how much we had done to the planet, and the way the planet, at last, had turned its great eye to us in anger. You have done enough. The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.

===

This earth, this sky, will come for us, she said, it'll get tired of us and come. And what comes after will be beautiful, even if we're not allowed to see it.

No wonder it was happening now, Sunny Jim thought. After what we had done.

===

No. No, no. The truth is, I do not know what the captain was thinking. I never met her, never got to talk to her. She was gone, and the Carthage, too, before I ever knew they existed. But you must allow me these lies. The violence I do to all of them, when I put holes in their skulls to show you the thoughts in their heads. It is the only way I know how to bring them back for you -- them, the boat, the cities, everything -- and let them into your head. Maybe then we can live again, in you. As though it were the last day, and we were all risen from the dead.

===

We are not done for yet. If I did not believe that, there would be no point in writing, in trying to find you, so that we might speak to each other, tell each other what we have to say.

===

He could not look at the children. The ones who carried them had blood across their chests, all up and down their arms. They did not look down at themselves, just went back to the truck and got inside. Do not ask me to do anything more today.

===

Can you see it? We are here, all that was left, that I could bring together in the flashes of these pages. We are here in the curves of every letter, in the curl of a comma. In the spaces between the words. [...] It is too much. It is not enough. There are not enough pages, and there was never enough time -- I should have known that, but I am still trying. I am trying to reach you, wherever you are, wherever you have gone, because we all have to find each other somehow, even if the words are all that is left when we do. Perhaps now we can tell you the things we could not say then. How much we love you. How we are sorry. How we know it will get better, even if we are only here to see it through you.

Good-bye. Hello.

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite travel up river to find Jim's son in a post apocalyptic America.

Dream like and elegiac, this book meanders in and out of family history like the river the characters traverse. This is a journey worth taking.

[Kendyle]

This is not a review of the author and his book. I DNF’d the the audible version of this book. Even at 0.8 speed it was hard to follow and the narrative was monotone so your mind would drift. I don’t recommend the audio.