AISLE NINE

In this debut, a 17-year-old store clerk tries to avoid the hell portal in aisle nine.

After sustaining head trauma, Jasper wakes with no memory of the past. He finds evidence that his parents died on Hell Portal Day, which fell on Christmas nearly two years ago, when tens of thousands of portals to hell suddenly opened all around the world. Jasper stumbles back into his job at Sundown City’s Here For You mart, the site of one particularly menacing portal. The portals periodically spew out more violent demons, which are barely kept at bay by the Vanguard Corporation. All of this has become quite normal for the general public, but Jasper is haunted by a recurring image of four wraiths—and a sense that things are about to get worse. Humor and late-20th-century pop-culture references lighten the tone: Jasper’s roommate is a talking cat plushie, for example. As is often the case with this genre, plot takes precedence over character development. Jasper is understandably something of a blank slate, and the rest of the cast is filled largely with stock types. Still, the plot twists are clever enough to keep the pages turning. Kyle, the main girl character (and potential love interest), is Taiwanese American; Jasper has “floppy dark hair and darker eyes.”

An intriguing corporate military state apocalypse fueled by nightmares and served with a side of romance.