Books of 2022 #1 - Square3

Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire became my go-to apocalypse author at the beginning of the pandemic. I found her zombie trilogy (although it’s expanded far beyond trilogy now) Feed very early on - around February. There was nothing like heading into a viral pandemic while reading about how the world and the CDC had coped (or not) with a cross between Ebola and the flu that turned humans into zombies. Nobody is better at expressing the dichotomy inherent in all humans - the experience of being human is too much to bear, and humans are too resilient to do anything but keep moving forward.

She does more of the same in her novella Square3, where two sisters in Illinois are caught on opposite sides of a world-altering rift. Aliens have arrived, and earth will never be the same. Well, some parts of it. No humans can enter the rift zones, and the areas outside them seem mostly unchanged. But the people who were inside the zones when the Anomaly happened are lost forever. Or maybe not.

We follow Susan as she fights to master the physics of the rift and learn the fate of her sister, and as we watch her struggles, we learn what is always a fundamental truth in Mira Grant’s stories. Everything will change, nothing can ever go back to the way it was before. But the way you survive matters more than whether you make it to the end of the story.

It’s a quick read, but a good intro to Mira Grant’s style. If you enjoy it, I highly recommend the Feed trilogy, A Kingdom of Needle and Bone, and Into the Drowning Deep. She’ll scare the shit out of you, and make you realize things about humanity and yourself that you can never forget.