The Electric Kingdom by David Arnold

 

When a deadly Fly Flu sweeps the globe, it leaves a shell of the world that once was. Among the survivors are eighteen-year-old Nico and her dog, on a voyage devised by Nico's father to find a mythical portal; a young artist named Kit, raised in an old abandoned cinema; and the enigmatic Deliverer, who lives Life after Life in an attempt to put the world back together. As swarms of infected Flies roam the earth, these few survivors navigate the woods of post-apocalyptic New England, meeting others along the way, each on their own quest to find life and light in a world gone dark. The Electric Kingdom is a sweeping exploration of love, art, storytelling, eternal life, and above all, a testament to the notion that even in an exterminated world, one person might find beauty in another.

---

So this post apocalyptic novel...sort of isn't.

I mean, it is. It's set in a world devastated by a mutated bee carrying a deadly fly. Most of the characters are children who have grown up in this world and don't know anything else. They go scavenging and grow a lot of their own food, and at various points we meet a gang of raiders and a truly unpleasant Bible basher. So far, so post apocalyptic.

But there's also some sci fi going on in there, and I didn't feel like the storylines meshed very well. Either story on its own would have been really cool, but for me, they didn't make sense put together. It felt a bit like Patrick Ness' Release, which had a great story about a teenager on the day everything in his life changed, and also something weird about a ghost and a faun that never really crossed over with the main story or made sense. 

It's a shame, because individually the two stories - children grown up in a post apocalyptic world who are now moving out from the protection of adults, and the strange sci fi ness of the Deliverer - are entertaining. But by grafting them together, everything got confused, and plenty of storylines didn't get finished up properly. What was the illness killing the adults? Where did (redacted character) vanish to? Why did Kit seem to be remembering past lives when the person living them over and over was someone else entirely?

Not awful; definitely worth a look. But not one of the better ones, either.

The Electric Kingdom publishes on the 9th February, 2021.