Issue 6: Teenage Wasteland
Hey there!
It’s been a while! The January issue never happened, thanks to a move and other exciting life stuff taking up most of our time, spare and otherwise. But we’re back and ready to discuss the best of YA and YA-adjacent dystopias for issue 6! This time Alex is talking The Reapers are the Angels, zombies, and loving a broken world, while Claudia covers language and personal responsibility in The Knife of Never Letting Go.
Alex on The Reapers are the Angels
Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels is two parts Flannery O’Connor to one part The Walking Dead, and if you can’t roll with this book’s particular brand of ridiculousness, you might have a hard time enjoying it. The protagonist, Temple, is a fifteen-year-old girl who talks like a southern-fried-Gothic grandma, grew up half-feral, and knows how to use a machine gun. She’s got guts, faith—“Ain’t no hell deep enough to keep heaven out.”—and, most importantly, love for the dystopian world she was born into.
Her love gives Temple her soul and the book its heart. There may be pestilence oozing up from the ground and zombies on the prowl, but post-apocalyptic America is also a miraculous place. Temple believes that God reveals Himself to her in everything from glittering fish to an unopened pack of peanut butter crackers, and Reapers never suggests her belief is merely a coping mechanism. Instead, Temple remains clear-eyed but stubbornly optimistic, certain that the world cares about her. Somehow, it does.
Still, this is one of those apocalypses where living at all means accepting that eventually you’ll have to kill somebody. When she (reluctantly) suffocates a man in self-defense, Temple finds herself in the sights of his brother, Moses Todd. Todd sees himself in Temple and lets her know it: “[W]e dwell on the land, not just behind the walls. We know the look of God is still on us.” Like Temple, Todd would rather explore than settle, and his homebrewed faith is similarly intense. But where Temple’s God is “slick,” deftly guiding her to hidden wonders, Todd’s is Old Testament. Todd doesn’t go after Temple because he hates her (he doesn’t) or because he loved his brother (he didn’t). “You gotta die by my hand,” he begs her towards the end, “Otherwise none of it makes any goddamn sense.” He’s hellbent on fitting his eye-for-an-eye idea of justice to a world he can’t otherwise control.
Todd isn’t the only character whose need for control has turned him monstrous. Like a good southern gothic, Reapers is populated with a cast of grotesques, and like a good zombie novel, none of these guys happen to be zombies. Twisted families, though, are a constant, from the Griersons withering in their gated mansion to an inbred, mutating clan of hillbillies (the book’s phrasing) who experiment on zombies and each other. The antagonistic partnership Temple and Todd develop is somehow on the more functional end of the spectrum. At least they understand what the world’s become and what they’ve become by living in it. Cruelty is ever-present, but in Reapers true evil doesn’t grow out of the environment itself; it comes from trying to reshape it. Todd’s need for the world to make sense is just as destructive as the hillbillies’ belief that they’re its inheritors.
Only Temple understands that beyond survival, actually living depends on accepting the world for what it is “and try[ing] not to get bogged down by what it ain’t.” Her acceptance is really its own kind of resistance; it takes gumption to trust in a dying world. Temple doesn’t just take in its beauty, she’s sure that beauty means God is looking out for her, and she loves it. She finds people to love, too, cracks jokes, and road trips from one end of the country to the other. Despite everything, she lives a life full of hard-won joy. At points, even Reapers seems in awe of her. I definitely am.
I’m also worried that I’m not delivering on what I first promised—guys, this book is ridiculous. The prose is purple. The philosophizing almost never lets up. Temple fires off zingers like “Who’s us, golden boy?” as if they’re totally normal things to say. At heart, though, Reapers is perfectly, earnestly ridiculous in its conviction that the world can be your home even as it’s falling to pieces. Temple understands how, and why. In the end, that’s what saves her.
Claudia on The Knife of Never Letting Go
I remember the YA dystopian boom of the 2010s with a lot of fondness, not the least because of how snobbish I was about it when it was actually going on. I loved The Hunger Games, of course, but then picked my way through Divergent and half of The Maze Runner before turning my nose up at the entire genre as hackneyed, cliched, and ridiculous.
These days, I’m prepared to give the genre a lot more credit than I did as a self-important sixteen- and seventeen-year-old. Sure, there were plenty of books and movies that seem like cynical cash grabs even now, but at their best YA dystopians combine the stress and misery of puberty with earnest examinations of social and moral issues. This earnestness, which I was far too ready to dismiss as melodrama, permeates Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go.
The novel, the first in a trilogy, manages to be both crushingly cynical and stubbornly hopeful, and it’s also stylistically fascinating. Todd, the protagonist, is an illiterate almost-thirteen-year-old living in the sinister Prentisstown, an all-male colony on the planet New World. His narration is marked by phonetic spelling, unique turns of phrase, and intrusive, ugly scrawls: ever since a mysterious war with the native inhabitants of New World, all of the colonists can hear each others’ thoughts. They call this phenomenon the Noise, and it’s ever-present. As Todd learns the truth behind the Noise and the bloody history of New World, The Knife of Never Letting Go becomes a fascinating meditation on the futility and power of language.
The Noise makes it impossible—or at least extremely difficult—for the colonists to conceal their true thoughts and feelings from each other, which is one of the more obvious ways the novel shows how language can be an inadequate, and even dangerous, cover for someone’s true nature. Taking this theme in another direction is the characterization of Todd, who becomes a fascinating argument for some measure of incorruptibility in the human spirit. He is far from perfect, and is prone to the same anger, violence, and cowardice as his peers, but he also possesses a flexibility they lack, even though he is just as steeped in the nastiness and paranoia of the collective language of Prentisstown. Todd stubbornly holds to his own thoughts and opinions, remarking “Men lie, and to theirselves worst of all.” This perception allows him to hold on to his beliefs, and also to change them, no matter the poison of the words the Noise engulfs him in.
While Ness suggests that there is some essential part of individual integrity (and by implication, lack thereof) that words simply can’t influence, he also turns to language as a beacon to our better natures. Shortly after discovering a crashed spaceship and a girl named Viola, Todd is forced to flee with her. His talisman during his journey towards a more complete understanding of his planet is his dead mother’s journal, given to him by his adoptive fathers. Todd is unable to read, but he treasures the book, and in a touching scene where he asks Viola to read the journal to him, takes strength from his mother’s promise that “I’ll never leave you and I promise you this so you can one day promise it to others.”
Hearing his mother’s words cements Todd’s loyalty to Viola, and the image of a young boy learning sacrifice through maternal influence is a powerful one. It also points to The Knife of Never Letting Go’s overarching preoccupation: showing how those who possess language are its driving force, and how they are able to give it power or mitigate the impact of damaging rhetoric. And in the book’s world, this power isn’t just humanity’s privilege, since humans, New World’s native population, and even animals are able to communicate across species. It’s a big-hearted call to awareness and responsibility tempered by a grim warning of what happens when that responsibility is ignored. “The Noise is a man unfiltered,” Todd says, “and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.”
Thanks to our small but awesome group of readers for sticking with us this long. We have some exciting themes planned for 2021, starting with Spectacle for issue 7. See you then!
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia