An Englishman, a freedom fighter and a scientist walk into a bar.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
It’s 2042 and this Englishman, he’s been through the wars. Scully just wants a drink and enough coin for another round. He doesn’t care for New Industry politics, gang wars or science projects that could change the world.
But this bar’s special. It’s the sort of place people go to hire help with those things.
People promising a lot of drinking money.
The sort of money that might get your average lout tearing up the American Remnant, cussing from one violently hungover encounter to another, to hell with the consequences.
And the consequences of this particular encounter – they’re big. Soil-your-pants big.
See, there’s a mark who needs protecting, Laine Faergrowe, and he’s no typical scientist. And this ain’t like other jobs. With every man fighting for himself in this corrupt wasteland, here’s a guy offering a little piece of hope. Shame so many people want him dead.
Our Scully, drunk and/or irritable and with barely a noble bone in his vicious body, is the only one who can save him.
Lucky for us, he knows how to put the punch in punchline.
The Worst Survive is a frenetic ride through a retro-future dystopia rife with colourful gangs, a madcap mystery and ever-mounting stakes. It’s Mad Max meets Blade Runner meets Dredd and whatever other action-packed horror-show of a future you can think of. Strap yourself in for a bloody good/bad time!
I got lucky enough to get an ARC of this due out on July 28th, and I can’t recommend it enough!
Some books ease you in. This one drops you straight into the wreckage and dares you to keep up. New Oak City, 2042, everyone’s out to screw you, and Scully’s one of the ones getting paid to do the screwing. He’s a hired gun with a drinking problem and zero patience for gang politics or science projects that might save the world, and his body count would make most heroes blush. He’s not a good man. He’s not the villain either. That line is exactly where this book lives, and it’s a mean, bruising place to sit for a while.
Laine, the scientist he’s meant to protect, is really just the parcel here. The story is Scully, his ragtag bar-family, and a widening circle of people he can’t quite work out are friends, enemies, or victims yet. That uncertainty runs through basically everyone in this book. Lena, kidnapped and dragged along for the ride, might be a hostage, an ally, or running her own game entirely, and nobody gets to sit still in one box for long.
He gave me a quote and removed the tarp to better see the project. For a guy who flinched at me getting out of a vehicle, he was remarkably unmoved by the four corpses with dish-sized bullet-holes. The car dropped on the ground and shook all the carnage up, fresh splatters on the windows.
It took me a while to warm to Scully. He’s got a mouth on him, and his running commentary on women isn’t something I have patience for in general, that’s more a me thing than a book thing. But it’s his voice, not the author’s, and once you push past it there’s a loyal, sharp, protective man underneath the swagger. Protective of those he likes that is. The rest can get a bullet to the head.
This shifted into the usual degenerate broader argument of tits vs arse and we were getting increasingly louder as we adopted our relative positions with impassioned arguments. The rest of the bar went quiet as I shouted, “You don’t even deserve balls!”
The pace barely lets up, hard-boiled and looking-back-on-it-all in exactly the right way. The fight scenes came thick and fast, maybe a touch too thick for me since I don’t read action scene by scene, but it’ll probably land better for readers who do.
By the end the job’s done and the bigger picture’s cracked wide open. This is a frenetic, foul-mouthed ride through a world that won’t let you get comfortable, and Scully’s the kind of bastard you end up rooting for anyway.
So if I’ve now whetted your appetite, you can get your own copy here!
Stuart Cripps-Schnoor
Angela Boord
Tom Joyce