The Desolation

by Andrew Gillsmith, Karen Holmes (Editor), Yuval Kordov (Editor)

An undead conscience may be the most terrifying monster of them all.

After a mysterious catastrophe renders the Holy Land uninhabitable, Jerusalem becomes a place people no longer go to live—but to die. In three stories spanning several decades, Gillsmith explores a broken sacramental landscape that mirrors the haunted interior lives of its characters.

Written in the tradition of A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Road, and Dostoevsky's The Idiot, The Desolation does for spiritual horror what Annihilation did for ecological horror. Here, it is not mere biology that is transformed but the soul itself. Contact with mystery is the catalyst, but it is the characters' choices that matter most.

Gillsmith has created a work of serious theology that never evangelizes, treating faith and doubt not as opposites but as two sides of the same coin. It prefers to ask questions and leave the answers to readers, dissolving sentimentality and easy moral arithmetic until all that remains is the naked human ache for meaning and mercy.

Genres: Horror

236 pages, Paperback

Published January 16, 2026

Reviews

[Jon James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark parable, indeed! The Desolation is not for casual readers. If you cannot look past the sins of the protagonist and seek to understand what the author is saying about those sins, this is not a book you should read.

The Desolation takes the worst of the worst humanity has to offer and drops them into a bleak and apocalyptic Holy Land that kills all who enter it. It dives into what it means to repent and whether salvation has limits.

Yet despite the vileness of the characters, the book does not descend into the nihilism of grimdark. Partly it is held aloft by the humor of the enigmatic survivor wandering the desolation, the seemingly immortal Leibowitz. And partly it explores the promise that all sins can be forgiven--but only if you can humble yourself enough to ask for it.

Many readers will be put off by the book, but those who can stomach the glimpse it gives into the mind of truly awful people will be rewarded by a theological journey into the darkest parts of the human soul and the unquenchable light that lurks even there.

[Jake Theriault]

This review was originally published, with additional citations, on Off The Shelf.

Disclosure: I was provided a digital copy of this book by the author.

“When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.”

—Ray Bradbury (“How to Keep and Feed a Muse”, The Writer, July, 1961)

I very much enjoy the fiction of Andrew Gillsmith. His Our Lady of the Artilects and A Cloud of Unknowing are some of the best books I’ve read in recent years (I am steeped in anticipation for whenever the third book in the trilogy arrives), and so I am always eager and accepting of the opportunities to enjoy a free taste of his newest works. (Though I always buy a physical copy on my own!)

The Desolation is a revision and expansion of Gillsmith’s 2024 novella The Jerusalem Passage (which, in this volume, stands as the first of three parts that make up the story). I read The Jerusalem Passage in 2024, and though I found it uniquely captivating I’d hesitate to say I “enjoyed” it. It is more the kind of story you endure, rather than enjoy; but, to be clear, I say this as a compliment! It’s one of those stories that you tell people, “Yeah, it was great, but I probably won’t read it again.”

Well… with the publication of The Desolation, I read it again. And I’m glad I did.

I used the above Ray Bradbury quote when I first reviewed The Jerusalem Passage on Goodreads. I think that sentiment still stands, that both The Jerusalem Passage and The Desolation fulfill the idea Bradbury is describing—that, in their truthfulness to the ideas and sentiments of the author, they become poetry spoken from the heart; but looking back on my previous review, taken as a whole, I unfortunately don’t feel like it does justice to Gillsmith’s work. In the presence of the weighty themes with which the book was playing, and the clear care with which Gillsmith was exploring them, I think I was too eager to stamp the book with a big red label marked “IMPORTANT”—which now feels oddly reductive. Yes it’s got important things to say, but that’s not why it, as a book, is worth reading. And for this, Andrew, I apologize. I am grateful that the publication of The Desolation have given me an opportunity for a “take two.”

We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places. …My god… we can’t do a thing! No force in the world can contain this blight… The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

—Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

As said above, The Desolation takes place in three parts: “The Jerusalem Passage,” “The House of The Four Last Things,” and “The Eighth Sacrament.” The three stories recount brief moments in the lives of two protagonists, each of whom is accompanied at various times by a wanderer named Leibowitz (named in tribute to the works of Walter Miller Jr.). I think it makes some sense to discuss these three stories in two parts: focusing first on “The Jerusalem Passage,” and then on the following two sections. Though I am not entirely content with my previous review of The Jerusalem Passage as a whole, I will cannibalize parts of it here and there.

In his Afterword for the original publication of The Jerusalem Passage, Gillsmith writes:

Forgiveness and mercy are truly the only hope, but we humans are so limited in our capacity for these things. So the story had to be about the limits of forgiveness and mercy, both human and divine. …It is impossible to explore the limits of forgiveness and mercy without probing the depths of evil.

With this on my mind, I titled my previous review The Jerusalem Passage (the novella) “The Quality of Mercy,” in reference to Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice. Even before reading Gillsmith’s Afterword, I kept finding myself thinking of Shakespeare’s verse as I was reading The Jerusalem Passage; and we’ll get into why after some further exploration.

“The Jerusalem Passage”—both in novella form and as it appears in The Desolation—tells the tale of a priest partaking in a death march through a desecrated Holy Land—a death march through the titular Desolation. The means by which the land has been changed are never made clear, but like the Zone in the Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (“The farther into the Zone, the closer to heaven”), or Area X in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, or the dismal moors of “The Demoiselle d’Ys” in Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow (“It is easy to enter, but sometimes they who enter never leave it”), traversal of the Desolation is dangerous—mortally dangerous. You do not make the passage to the blasted husk of Jerusalem unless you wish to die. But some people do, deliberately. To this end, the Church has established a presence in and around the Desolation, in order to guide would-be penitent pilgrims to their final rest. Janusz, the aforementioned priest, is on just such a pilgrimage. The sin at the root of his penance, though unspecified in the opening pages, is made progressively clearer as the tale unfolds; and it is dire. When Andrew first approached me with the prospect of reading The Jerusalem Passage, he warned me it would be “extremely dark.” He was not kidding.

Mid-way through the story, Janusz inner-monologues:

Men said that sin became easier over time. Acts of violation or perversion that began as delectations lost their savor and became mere sustenance, and committing them became as rote and joyless as any autonomic function of the body. The conscience was numbed and the mind came to think of the sin as necessary in order to live. A necessary evil was no less necessary because it was evil. Necessity was stronger than evil.

It is like the Strugatsky Brothers wrote: “Pigs can always find mud.” To even consider Janusz’ sin as being necessary, so necessary to him as to require its repetition, will likely make the reader’s stomach churn. Gillsmith does not even give Janusz the “out” of the Apostle Paul. Janusz doesn’t hate the sin, just the result of it, what he loses when the subject of his sin is no longer available. In the act of his sin, “Eden was open to him,” Gillsmith writes, and Janusz “felt no sense of guilt.” One will find it easy to hate Janusz, and that gut reaction is somewhat the point. It is a point precisely manufactured to force the reader towards introspection. As Gillsmith wrote in his Afterword: “It is impossible to explore the limits of forgiveness and mercy without probing the depths of evil.”

In perhaps a more metatextual moment, Leibowitz—Gillsmith’s Virgil leading Janusz and other characters though the Desolation—appears to point toward the storytelling here, that’s it’s about

“[making] a human connection, to get out of your own head. To learn something, to change your mind or deepen your convictions. To be surprised or redeemed. Every time you meet someone new, that is a chance from God to be something better than you were before.”

To Janusz, that someone is Leibowitz, or any number of other pilgrims traveling through the Desolation; but to us, the readers, the new someone we’re meeting is Janusz. And we’re given the chance to become something better than we were before.

Knowing what I already did about the events recounted in “The Jerusalem Passage,” I was—if I’m being honest—a little apprehensive to discover what Gillsmith had added in the next two parts. But, mercifully, Gillsmith front-loads the most horrific elements of the book, leaving the latter two thirds for a subtler, more meandering exploration of the Desolation and its effects.

Parts two and three of The Desolation (“The House of The Four Last Things” and “The Eighth Sacrament”) tell a two part story about a man—known to us for most of the story only as “The Liar”—in the employ of the Lazars overseeing the Desolation and its pilgrims. “The House of The Four Last Things” sees Gillsmith most clearly emulating the Strugatsky Brothers (and it is my favorite of the book’s three parts). The Liar performs for the Lazars essentially the same task the Strugatsky’s “stalkers” do in Roadside Picnic, exploring the ruin of the Desolation to recover relics, artifacts, and wayward travelers (if they survive long enough to be recovered). The Liar, unlike nearly everyone else who wanders into the Desolation, is, for whatever reason, seemingly immune to the effects of the place, coming and going from the ruined land without ever contracting the deadly “Desolation sickness.”

It’s in these two sections that we also get much of the book’s VanderMeer-ian influence. There is a moment in “The Eighth Sacrament” which keenly recalled in my mind a moment from VanderMeer’s Authority (the second of the Southern Reach novels), not even to speak of these books’ shared interests in terroir and large reptiles (and, branching off from The Southern Reach, if you enjoyed VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground or the otherworldliness of Dead Astronauts there is a similar texture here that you’ll likely appreciate).

There’s also something quite Philip K. Dick-ian about The Desolation. I can feel shades of the Mercer arc from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in “The Jerusalem Passage,” and bits of (extendedly from Dick’s own work) Blade Runner in “The House of The Four Last Things,” but there’s also just a lot of Philip K. Dick—the man, not just the writer—in here too.

While I was reading The Desolation I was also reading What If Our World Is Their Heaven?—a book of transcribed interviews with Philip K. Dick from shortly before he abruptly died in March of 1982—and in one of those interviews Dick offhandedly said:

It’s a strange feeling, the feeling you’re living in the apocalypse.

That quote stuck with me through the latter third of The Desolation. Aesthetically, we might say that The Desolation is pre-apocalyptic. Here again it shares DNA with VanderMeer’s Southern Reach. The world is in the beginning stages of ending; but, of course, no one can know the day or the hour, only observe the slow march toward it, the ticking hand of the Doomsday Clock ticking closer and closer to midnight. We know it’s coming, but when? And what do we do in the meantime?

Where the first section of the book—“The Jerusalem Passage”—is focused on sin and forgiveness, justice, and mercy; these back two thirds of The Desolation seem much more interested in that time we have while we approach the end of all things. Not our personal deaths, as is the case of Janusz’ tale; but the death of everything. I found myself thinking a lot about C.S. Lewis' “On Living in the Atomic Age” during the final moments of the story:

Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature—then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without the possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it.

As Lewis muses later in his essay, so too does Leibowitz come to similar conclusion, telling The Liar:

“God is a beckoner, I always say. Always calling us, always whispering to us in our dreams and knocking at the door. …[Inviting us to] life, to belonging, to mercy. To wholeness and healing and communion with Him. Maybe this is another invitation.”

“This”—the end of the world. An invitation. “God only knows how much time you have left!” Leibowitz says. I return then to Shakespeare.

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.

Mercy, like rain, is life-giving and purifying. Portia, in her pleas for mercy, is appealing to the dignity of all human beings. Even the darkest soul still resides within a human being. An image bearer. In The Desolation, Gillsmith asks what we will do when confronted by sin, and by the call of mercy, of justice, or of forgiveness. Will we seek them out, will they find us out instead? How will they change us? Will we have the time to give them, or receive them? Will we make the time?

As I’m sitting here writing this review, my iTunes library has begun to play Ozzy Osbourne’s “A Thousand Shades” from his 2022 album Patient Number 9—his final album. I hadn’t thought of it before now, but as I’m listening to it, it feels like, where The Desolation to ever become a movie, this might be a fitting selection for the end credits:

There's a thousand different shades of darkness
Coloring our faith
The past is dead, the future's haunted
What happened to today?

The Desolation explores those thousand shades, the dead past, and the haunted future. What will we do with today?

I’ll end with another quote from the great C.S. Lewis:

What we want are not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.

The Desolation is just such a book.

[Andrew Gillsmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

There will be people who hate this book. I know this. What's more, I understand it.

This is dark material. There is light in it, but the light is not easy to find.

In the first story, you will meet Fr. Janusz, a priest who has committed the worst possible sin—the destruction of an innocent soul. His pride and self-loathing prevent him from attempting real atonement (if atonement for such an offense is even possible). Instead, he intellectualizes his sin, makes it abstract, cloaks it in mystery and false beauty. He absorbs his own rationalizations so thoroughly that the sins of others seem petty and laughable to him by comparison. Only he is worthy of God’s wrath. Only he has dared to do what is beyond redemption. All else is so trifling as to be unworthy of confession and repentance. His hatred of himself cannot be contained, and so it expands into hatred of all people. Hatred of innocence itself.

When these stratagems inevitably fail, he undertakes the titular death pilgrimage, hoping that self-immolation without true remorse might suffice. Along the way, he is visited by horrific visions and taunted by a fellow traveler who seems immune to the effects of the “contaminated” Holy Land. In the end, he attempts a small act of mercy, though even this is suffused with pride.

Some readers have asked me if I thought he was “saved” in the end. I resisted giving an answer because in the moral universe of the story, such a question is ultimately unknowable. What I will say now is that I personally believe the answer is “no.” Perhaps there was a narrow path that he could have taken, but his swollen pride and hatred made it impossible for him to pass. That is the terror of the story: an undead conscience. Conscience is a rope down from heaven. But a malformed conscience, one that has been perverted by pride (along with any other number of deadly sins) is a ladder to hell.

A few readers have described this as "religious grimdark." I understand the thinking, but I disagree with the description. It is Incensepunk.

Incensepunk is in some ways a response and an antidote to modern Grimdark, which assumes that there is no such thing as objective truth and certainly no final judgment. Characters do terrible things. Moral categories are intentionally blurred and confused. Charisma and wit are often pressed into the service of producing sympathy for “dark” characters. We are told, sometimes explicitly, that “this is how the world really is,” which is of course just a means of short-circuiting any moral critique of the work ahead of time.

Grimdark clearly has an audience, based on the bestseller lists and the wild success of series like Game of Thrones. In me, it generally produces feelings ranging from queasiness to outright anger. I feel that it “begs the question” by insinuating that anyone who disagrees is a rube, a simpleton, or some kind of religious fanatic. (not incidentally, religious fanatics are often the only characters portrayed as objectively evil in grimdark settings.)

Incensepunk, by contrast, generally exists in a moral universe where absolute truth does exist. Characters still do terrible things. They may suffer unjustly or make terrible choices. But they are still subject to the "deep laws." The moral categories do not change, even when violated. In this sense, Incensepunk owes more to Dostoevsky, Flannery O'Connor or even (yes) Cormac McCarthy than to its direct, science fiction antecedents. Incensepunk at its best is theological fiction. If all you want is religious aesthetics divorced from logic, well---there’s always Warhammer 40K (“the Emperor is so based!”).

Incensepunk is also, I believe, a direct challenge to the sensibilities of many modern readers of speculative fiction. In general, the audience has been trained for the last several decades to want one of two options:
a) Good and Evil do not exist at all, or
b) If they do exist, then the page must drip with overt judgment at every turn, lest the readers feel judged themselves.

Incensepunk rejects both options. Good and Evil do exist in the world of Incensepunk, even if misunderstood or obscured by the doubts and shortcomings of the characters. Incensepunk trusts readers to understand this without having to be reminded every few paragraphs. I suspect that my beta reader would have found the book more palatable if I had literally placed Janusz in the fires of hell or indulged in some torture porn during his descent. This would have eliminated any possibility of confusion, but it would have made for a worse book.

Because Incensepunk draws on far older, more theogically-grounded concepts of Good and Evil, the latter is often portrayed as complex and even intelligent. In our world, true evil is almost always both. Evil has its own glamour, otherwise it would not be dangerous. Think of Milton’s Satan. Good may be complicated, but it is rarely subtle or nuanced. Incensepunk does not anathematize doubt or make the perfect the enemy of the good. In our stories, even good people will often fail to live up to their own standards. Incensepunk rejects modern grimdark, to be sure, but it also rejects grimdark’s simple cousin, “noblebright.”

What about suffering in Incensepunk? It is a central theme of many of our stories, but here again we reject default modern interpretations. Suffering, for example, is not inherently redemptive. Just because a character like Janusz suffers does not mean that he deserves our sympathy, let alone that he has in any way atoned for his crimes. Suffering in Incensepunk is not transactional. It does not automatically confer grace or forgiveness or “main character energy.” It is redemptive only to the extent to which it is accepted by the will and offered sacramentally on both the horizontal and vertical planes (i.e., to Heaven and to one’s fellow men and women). Even then, one can never be sure.

Thus it is fair to say that Incensepunk is not an unambitious little movement. It is aimed at the very foundations of what has passed for “sophisticated, modern literature” for many decades. It will be misunderstood, sometimes willfully. It will be derided and dismissed. It will be gatekept and held to different standards than works that are more culturally au currant. To this I say “good.” This is exactly the kind of crucible that will allow Incensepunk artists to produce work worthy of rising above the muck and mediocrity that characterizes the broader genre.