I don’t think I’ve said this here on Substack—I’ve certainly mentioned it once or twice in my Locus column—but I don’t read back cover copy. I like to go into a novel without any expectations or even pre-knowledge of what it’s about (except, you know, the basics. It has laser guns and spaceships, or it’s got swords and sandals, or it features talking fresh produce, etc.). This means I sometimes get caught out reading a book that, on reflection, if I’d known what it was about, I might not have picked up.*

 That’s somewhat the case with American Rapture. Despite the great cover, alluring title, and the fact it’s written by an author I’ve been meaning to read (because people I respect think she’s great), American Rapture is an apocalyptic virus-killer novel. As I said in my review of The Way, post-COVID, I’ve found this sub-genre mostly pointless. Whatever cautionary tale we were meant to learn back in the day has been rammed into us by lockdowns, vaccine mandates and the worst sort of people saying the worst sort of things on social media and getting away with it. So, yeah, I don’t need all that in my fiction. At least, not for another decade.

 American Rapture does strive to be more than just a killer virus novel. For one, the actual virus is a nasty form of zombification that turns the person into a rabid sex fiend. Because Leede gives no fucks and doesn’t throw punches, her descriptions are confronting and awful, as you’d expect from a plague that makes people want to brutally fuck anyone with a pulse. 

The other wrinkle that sets this apart from your average Station Eleven is that your main character, Sophie, has been brought up in a puritanical family and community that prohibits anything secular—including a basic understanding of what’s happening in the outside world. Sophie only finds out about the virus because her mother and father—who would faint if they saw anything remotely sexual—start rutting in front of her, and not in a loving married couple sort of way. Sophie escapes into the world, meets an older, kind cop she has feelings for, and then encounters a hot boy from her school who survived, with whom she also has feelings, all the while feeling guilty at all the “deviant” thoughts racing through her head. I’m making this sound a bit romantasy, but it’s very well handled by Leede, Sophie’s guilt is carefully fleshed out. She’s not a caricature.

 So, what’s your fucking problem, Ian? Once the novelty wears off, it falls into many of the pitfalls of the killer virus/zombie novel. The frantic moments of danger followed by desperate, tense moments of silence, some reflection and the odd bit of heavy petting. Rinse and repeat. If the novel was 60 pages shorter, I might have been OK with this, but, as it sits, it’s far too samey and familiar. By the halfway mark, I was getting bored. It was Leede’s prose—she knows how to craft a striking sentence—that dragged me along

 A lot of people love this book. If your tolerance for this sub-genre is higher than mine, you might also love it. At a minimum, it’s trying to do something new with a well-worn trope.

*Yes, it’s true that after 10 pages, I could have just stopped reading. And sometimes I do. In this case, I didn’t because the book, for all its flaws, is well written.