THE QUEST FOR AVALON

A group fleeing post-apocalyptic chaos travels to a survival bunker on a private island in Bennett’s speculative thriller.

A series of devastating plagues and pandemics over six decades has destroyed most of the functioning society in North America (and, possibly, in the rest of the world). In Cascadia, Washington, a houseful of holdouts and refugees has coalesced around Grant, the son of a successful inventor whose ubiquitous, low-maintenance solar devices allow technology to function despite the loss of infrastructure. The household is not immune to attacks by unfriendly have-nots or from the onslaught of Pan4, the deadliest contagion yet, which is spreading across the land. Fleeing an advancing wildfire (climatological menaces like rising sea levels, superstorms, earthquakes, and tsunamis are omnipresent concerns), the group goes to sea in a small boat and makes for “Avalon,” a rocky private island where Grant had the foresight to maintain “Camelot,” a survival shelter. It proves to be a meager, isolated, and claustrophobic haven for the four characters who take turns narrating: There’s Miriam, whose shadowy background includes a prison stay; Grant’s sister, Pearl, an aging novelist whose ailments are increasing; and resourceful doctor Mike, who finds himself falling slowly into the irreversible “zombie” catatonic state that prefigures the end stage of Pan4. Rather than serving up suspense and survivalist prepper action, this bleak tale deals in the fatalistic drama of slow deprivation, entropy, and regret as supplies diminish and safeguards fail. Readers may be reminded of introspective, worst-case-scenario survival sagas like The Mosquito Coast. The narrative is littered with literary references (particularly to The Wind in the Willows, The Phantom Tollbooth, and the works of Tolkien) and distinguished by the author’s brand of future-speak slang (“Puerto de Luz was high civ enough to have service for Mike’s vid to work, at least ’til the hurricane hit”), which avoids lending a too-heavy SF gloss to the proceedings.

Familiar eco-angst and Covid dread inspire this well-wrought, melancholy survival tale.