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Postapoc
Sole survivor of a suicide pact, Ang has fallen into an underground music scene obsessed with the idea of the end of the world. But when the end finally does come, Ang and her friends don't find the liberation they expected. Instead, those still alive are starving, strung out and struggling to survive in a world that no longer makes sense. As Ang navigates the world's final days, her emotional and physical instability mix with growing uncertainty and she begins to distrust her perception in a place where nothing can ever be trusted for what it seems to be. Bleak and haunting, "PostApoc" blends poetry and punk rock, surrealism and stark imagery to tell the story of a girl wavering at the edge of her sanity.
- GenresFictionScience Fiction
184 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2013
About the author
Liz Worth
10 books57 followersMy latest title, Going Beyond the Little White Book: A Contemporary Guide to Tarot, is now here.
This is my fifth book, and the first I've written on the subject of tarot.
In 2017, my latest poetry collection, The Truth is Told Better This Way, will be published by BookThug.
I thought her one and only career would be as a writer, but I started reading tarot in 2008 on the advice of an astrologer and my life has never been the same.
Today I tarot help others move past emotional and creative blocks, overcome any obstacles or setbacks, and begin to live their truth through personal freedom and creative liberation.
I'm based in Toronto, but read and teach clients all over the world thanks to the wonders of Skype.
Locally, I read tarot at Likely General and SeeSaw Cafe, as well as at a number of events throughout the city.
I also write an astrology column for Spiral Nature (www.spiralnature.com).
If you'd like to book a private reading with me, or sign up for a workshop, please visit my website.
Interested in more of my writing? Feel free to check out my current books: PostApoc (fiction), Amphetamine Heart (poetry), and Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond (non-fiction).
I find poetry in empty parking lots, inspiration on long bus rides, and clarity in the woods.
Lifelong obsessions include The Smiths, ghosts, black leather boots, John Hughes movies, The Outsiders, Poppy Z. Brite, The Cure, experimental writing, early mornings, thrift stores, and bike rides.
This is my fifth book, and the first I've written on the subject of tarot.
In 2017, my latest poetry collection, The Truth is Told Better This Way, will be published by BookThug.
I thought her one and only career would be as a writer, but I started reading tarot in 2008 on the advice of an astrologer and my life has never been the same.
Today I tarot help others move past emotional and creative blocks, overcome any obstacles or setbacks, and begin to live their truth through personal freedom and creative liberation.
I'm based in Toronto, but read and teach clients all over the world thanks to the wonders of Skype.
Locally, I read tarot at Likely General and SeeSaw Cafe, as well as at a number of events throughout the city.
I also write an astrology column for Spiral Nature (www.spiralnature.com).
If you'd like to book a private reading with me, or sign up for a workshop, please visit my website.
Interested in more of my writing? Feel free to check out my current books: PostApoc (fiction), Amphetamine Heart (poetry), and Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond (non-fiction).
I find poetry in empty parking lots, inspiration on long bus rides, and clarity in the woods.
Lifelong obsessions include The Smiths, ghosts, black leather boots, John Hughes movies, The Outsiders, Poppy Z. Brite, The Cure, experimental writing, early mornings, thrift stores, and bike rides.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
October 17, 2013
Review originally posted to Bookish Ardour.
PostApoc is one of those books I finish and discover I’m struck dumb; I have little to no words to share. I blame this reaction on the ending. It’s so, so open-ended, which I love, but I need to know more. More, more, more!
It took me some time to be won over by PostApoc. For the majority of the story I was lost, not irreparably to the story itself, but I was disconnected from the content. Once upon a time I was a music buff, but now struggle to listen to music regularly, and I have experimented in the past, but not with the hard stuff. The main character, Ang, is surrounded by drugs and music. Her environment, her friends, those she clings to out of survival, her modes of survival, are all permeated with drugs and music. Her perspectives for everything, the way she sees herself, the way she sees others, the way she ponders her past and present, and the way she analyses the end of the world are all influenced by her intoxicated state. Ang may have a hangover every now and then, but she is never completely sober and she is never free from being influenced.
Being new to Liz Worth’s work, I’m not sure how much of the prose is her style and how much is Ang’s language. At some point in a story you come to learn there’s a divorce between the two, but there are times when you either can’t find it, or you aren’t sure they’re separate. PostApoc is one where I couldn’t quite distinguish the difference. I know the author has a background in poetry and it’s something else I have considered when it comes to understand the use of language and phrases.
While I can’t help considering the author’s writing background and the utilisation of language, I would prefer to consider the story and prose as a tool for the character to express herself. Basically, she’s messed up so her descriptions are going to confuse me. They confused me all right. They confused me for a good while. I found myself wondering if she was really facing the end of the world or if she was hallucinating. As the story progressed and things got weirder, the oddest thing happened; I had no idea what was going on with the world around her, but I began to understand Ang and the rest of the characters.
PostApoc isn’t like other standard post-apocalyptic tales. The majority of stories will show the time before the end and explain the whys. PostApoc on the other hand is a really small-world story, the perspective is Ang’s and she has no idea what is going on. Everything is falling apart and the story does not begin before the end. There’s rumours about other places, there’s snippets into the downfall of other cities, but the main focus is on Ang and her friends struggling for survival.
It’s actually a depressing story. Everything unravels and mutates so fast and disturbingly, it’s a wonder my brain could still grasp the concept of the story. By the end, I found my footing in the prose and, surprisingly to me, came to love it. I find myself wanting to read PostApoc again, but more than that, I want to know what came of Ang and the end of her world.
December 11, 2013
[Full Disclosure: I was approached by the author to review this book and was provided a free .pdf.]
Liz Worth’s Post-Apoc takes place some unspecified time after an unspecified event (or series of events) referred to as ‘The End’. Canada (if not the whole world) is torn, society has fallen, and most if not all adults have disappeared. This leaves the cities populated by teenagers and youths who spend their days coping with the confusion and tragedy by taking vast quantities of alcohol and drugs and going to punk shows. We follow Ang as she wanders around the city, goes to shows and slowly degrades to an emaciated wreck, physically and mentally destroyed. Post-Apoc shuns the fire or ice of the commonly considered apocalypse in favor of a slow, drawn out end of the world and the confusion and ennui that would reign in such a time. At the fore front of the novel lives the inevitable return to basic impulses and horrifyingly banality that would ensue in such an environment.
Worth’s prose is imaginative but uneven. Ornate descriptions and turns of language are employed simply for their own sake and without much thought. This style is not bad in itself but becomes tiresome after a while and hardly manages to pull the weight of the whole book. There are certainly a few moments where the prose shines, such as in the line “The sun’s been stuck on sunset all day, but we’re sweating.” Which works well to juxtapose the evocative environment with the sense of oppression which runs through the work.
The characters are fairly dulled down (which is not necessarily a criticism in such a torn world) but there are also a lot of them and they never seem to stand apart from one another. The main character Ang is for the most part a non-entity, floating around, taking drugs, trying to figure out ways to stay alive. Together Ang and her girlfriends are portrayed as embattled survivors while the few male characters are uniformly out to use and destroy the girls. At least a little bit of nuance here would have made the interactions between characters more believable. The environment is gritty but I never got the feeling that Worth had created a ‘world’. This in part could be due to the isolation inherent in a technologically cut off world, and a world where survival takes priority over exploration and connection, but at least some sense of the state of the outside world would have done well to flesh out the atmosphere.
Much of Post-Apoc follows the characters’ hunt for the mythical drug ‘greyline’ a classic fictional drug, rumored to be ‘…made from the shake of magic mushrooms and the ashes of the dead. That crematoriums have been pillaged to make it.’ It serves well to distract the characters from the horror of their lives, and it becomes evident that the drug is not only addictive but very destructive. Worth does a very nice job drawing out the drug’s insidious damage, where no single dose can be related to the failure of the character’s bodies and yet the incidence of strange illnesses and possible hallucinations become increasingly frequent and increasingly more terrifying.
The self-conscious confusion and existential agony of living as a teenager (even in an unravaged society) is well portrayed here, almost to the point of fetishization. The characters are as lost as any other suburban teens and deal with it as well as they can. There is no hopeful looking toward the future, no hope for escape, no working toward a glorious resolution, an attitude which those of us who have lived through the ages of thirteen and nineteen will immediately find terribly familiar.
Honestly for a good part of the book I found the events (or lack thereof) to be mostly forgettable and found myself apathetic to the work. Towards its last quarter the main drive of Post-Apoc seemed to shift from the packed-in linguistic turns and descriptions of inebriation to a more solid and imminent series of events and I found myself pulled in, and then the book ended on a fairly flat note. A particularly harrowing scene where a strange semi-human monster girl silently takes up residence in the living room of Ang’s squat, passively pushing Ang and her housemates into smaller and smaller areas of the house, was reminiscent of Julio Cortazar’s House Taken Over and played the line nicely between horror and confusion, aggression and exhaustion. Probably to its detriment Post-Apoc as a whole shared quite a few traits with Grace Krilanovich’s Orange Eats Creeps and I found it hard not to compare the two books as I was reading.
Overall Post-Apoc is a readable novel which could appeal strongly to the post Hunger Games crowd. There is very little which is compelling or new here, but it holds a heartfelt and sad allegory of the pain of adolescence and the self-defeating means employed to assuage them.
Liz Worth’s Post-Apoc takes place some unspecified time after an unspecified event (or series of events) referred to as ‘The End’. Canada (if not the whole world) is torn, society has fallen, and most if not all adults have disappeared. This leaves the cities populated by teenagers and youths who spend their days coping with the confusion and tragedy by taking vast quantities of alcohol and drugs and going to punk shows. We follow Ang as she wanders around the city, goes to shows and slowly degrades to an emaciated wreck, physically and mentally destroyed. Post-Apoc shuns the fire or ice of the commonly considered apocalypse in favor of a slow, drawn out end of the world and the confusion and ennui that would reign in such a time. At the fore front of the novel lives the inevitable return to basic impulses and horrifyingly banality that would ensue in such an environment.
Worth’s prose is imaginative but uneven. Ornate descriptions and turns of language are employed simply for their own sake and without much thought. This style is not bad in itself but becomes tiresome after a while and hardly manages to pull the weight of the whole book. There are certainly a few moments where the prose shines, such as in the line “The sun’s been stuck on sunset all day, but we’re sweating.” Which works well to juxtapose the evocative environment with the sense of oppression which runs through the work.
The characters are fairly dulled down (which is not necessarily a criticism in such a torn world) but there are also a lot of them and they never seem to stand apart from one another. The main character Ang is for the most part a non-entity, floating around, taking drugs, trying to figure out ways to stay alive. Together Ang and her girlfriends are portrayed as embattled survivors while the few male characters are uniformly out to use and destroy the girls. At least a little bit of nuance here would have made the interactions between characters more believable. The environment is gritty but I never got the feeling that Worth had created a ‘world’. This in part could be due to the isolation inherent in a technologically cut off world, and a world where survival takes priority over exploration and connection, but at least some sense of the state of the outside world would have done well to flesh out the atmosphere.
Much of Post-Apoc follows the characters’ hunt for the mythical drug ‘greyline’ a classic fictional drug, rumored to be ‘…made from the shake of magic mushrooms and the ashes of the dead. That crematoriums have been pillaged to make it.’ It serves well to distract the characters from the horror of their lives, and it becomes evident that the drug is not only addictive but very destructive. Worth does a very nice job drawing out the drug’s insidious damage, where no single dose can be related to the failure of the character’s bodies and yet the incidence of strange illnesses and possible hallucinations become increasingly frequent and increasingly more terrifying.
The self-conscious confusion and existential agony of living as a teenager (even in an unravaged society) is well portrayed here, almost to the point of fetishization. The characters are as lost as any other suburban teens and deal with it as well as they can. There is no hopeful looking toward the future, no hope for escape, no working toward a glorious resolution, an attitude which those of us who have lived through the ages of thirteen and nineteen will immediately find terribly familiar.
Honestly for a good part of the book I found the events (or lack thereof) to be mostly forgettable and found myself apathetic to the work. Towards its last quarter the main drive of Post-Apoc seemed to shift from the packed-in linguistic turns and descriptions of inebriation to a more solid and imminent series of events and I found myself pulled in, and then the book ended on a fairly flat note. A particularly harrowing scene where a strange semi-human monster girl silently takes up residence in the living room of Ang’s squat, passively pushing Ang and her housemates into smaller and smaller areas of the house, was reminiscent of Julio Cortazar’s House Taken Over and played the line nicely between horror and confusion, aggression and exhaustion. Probably to its detriment Post-Apoc as a whole shared quite a few traits with Grace Krilanovich’s Orange Eats Creeps and I found it hard not to compare the two books as I was reading.
Overall Post-Apoc is a readable novel which could appeal strongly to the post Hunger Games crowd. There is very little which is compelling or new here, but it holds a heartfelt and sad allegory of the pain of adolescence and the self-defeating means employed to assuage them.
October 18, 2013
Book Info: Genre: Dystopian (?)
Reading Level: Adult
Recommended for: People who like to have their minds played with
Trigger Warnings: Suicide, suicidal ideation, rape
My Thoughts: Is this all real? That is the question I kept asking myself as I read this book. Is this actually happening, or is this some sort of irreality playing out in the narrator's brain. A hallucination? These questions are never answered, it is left up to the reader to decide if this is real or the imaginings of a very damaged mind. So many of the things that happen have the feeling of a drug-induced psychotic break that I never did decide this for myself.
The fact that this book invaded my dreams should give you a good idea of how strongly these thoughts affected me as I was reading it. But it was also a very hard book to read, with some difficult things running through it. Not only the suicide pact that Ang was part of, but also surviving in the leftovers of the world after everything goes crazy. The starvation, the fear, the danger, the eating of cats and dogs. I just really had a difficult time. In a good way, I hasten to add. This book made me think, made me wonder, and left tendrils of itself in my brain. If you're interested in this book, check it out. Just be99 aware it will seriously mess with your mind.
Disclosure: I received an e-galley from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Synopsis: Sole survivor of a suicide pact, Ang has fallen into an underground music scene obsessed with the idea of the end of the world. But when the end finally does come, Ang and her friends don't find the liberation they expected. Instead, those still alive are starving, strung out and struggling to survive in a world that no longer makes sense. As Ang navigates the world's final days, her emotional and physical instability mix with growing uncertainty and she begins to distrust her perception in a place where nothing can ever be trusted for what it seems to be. Bleak and haunting, "PostApoc" blends poetry and punk rock, surrealism and stark imagery to tell the story of a girl wavering at the edge of her sanity.
October 15, 2013
I got a copy of this book from NETGALLEY for early review. thanks.
Reviewed at The Literary Insomniac
page count: 184
Pub: Now or Never Publishing Company
Expected publication: October 15th 2013
I got a copy of this book from NetGalley for early review. thanks.
This book kept me up nights and screwed with my head! It just drew me into it and changed my mood(and my appetite) for as long as I was reading it.
so here it is:
She deals with it by staying drugged most of the time, but it isn’t easy to get drugs these days. The dealers are not accepting regular payment. Not since money’s lost all value.
Now you have to pay in.. unconventional methods.
The story mixes punk rock with poetry, suicide, mayhem and destruction
This isn’t so much a survival in a post-apocalypse world as it is an exploration of what it takes to push a person to the absolute limit of what is humanely possible.
When the world ends, what are the first things that go wrong? apparently: the thin veil of civilization we've managed to uphold so far.
It was full of after-the-end scenery that set my teeth on edge, they were so gritty. Liz Worth’s got quite the imagination.
This is equal parts Horror and fantasy. There were parts that left me cringing and not all that happy with the world.
I won’t lie, it’s very graphic but somehow it poetic at the same time.
Eerie, impossibly frustrating open ending.
After I finished this book, I just stared at the screen with my mouth open for several minutes.
This book comes out today! definitely read it, it’s incredible.
RATING: 5/5
Reviewed at The Literary Insomniac
page count: 184
Pub: Now or Never Publishing Company
Expected publication: October 15th 2013
I got a copy of this book from NetGalley for early review. thanks.
This book kept me up nights and screwed with my head! It just drew me into it and changed my mood(and my appetite) for as long as I was reading it.
so here it is:
She deals with it by staying drugged most of the time, but it isn’t easy to get drugs these days. The dealers are not accepting regular payment. Not since money’s lost all value.
Now you have to pay in.. unconventional methods.
The story mixes punk rock with poetry, suicide, mayhem and destruction
This isn’t so much a survival in a post-apocalypse world as it is an exploration of what it takes to push a person to the absolute limit of what is humanely possible.
When the world ends, what are the first things that go wrong? apparently: the thin veil of civilization we've managed to uphold so far.
It was full of after-the-end scenery that set my teeth on edge, they were so gritty. Liz Worth’s got quite the imagination.
This is equal parts Horror and fantasy. There were parts that left me cringing and not all that happy with the world.
I won’t lie, it’s very graphic but somehow it poetic at the same time.
Eerie, impossibly frustrating open ending.
After I finished this book, I just stared at the screen with my mouth open for several minutes.
This book comes out today! definitely read it, it’s incredible.
RATING: 5/5
September 25, 2013
My copy was an ARC I received from the publisher for an honest review.
WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Outside, the dogs have all gone wild. Can you hear them? Can you feel them down there, voices shaking through loose skin?
First thing first-the cover is beautiful. The title is perfect. One word and so many meanings..
But that's not all. The most wonderful thing about this book is the writing. I've never read such beautiful, lyrical prose. I kept coming back to many paragraphs, just to contemplate their poetic brillance.
I won't write about the plot, it's all in the blurb provided by the publisher. And it's not about the plot at all. It's about the music (that's why I loved PostApoc), it's about the postapocaliptic world and its twisted beauty.
Be careful what you wish for.
WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Outside, the dogs have all gone wild. Can you hear them? Can you feel them down there, voices shaking through loose skin?
First thing first-the cover is beautiful. The title is perfect. One word and so many meanings..
But that's not all. The most wonderful thing about this book is the writing. I've never read such beautiful, lyrical prose. I kept coming back to many paragraphs, just to contemplate their poetic brillance.
I won't write about the plot, it's all in the blurb provided by the publisher. And it's not about the plot at all. It's about the music (that's why I loved PostApoc), it's about the postapocaliptic world and its twisted beauty.
Be careful what you wish for.
February 5, 2014
I received this novel from NetGalley.
Two stars... Two little stars all because the writing is amazing, and that is where the praise ends, although this is an incredibly diferent take on the end of the world, I found it lacking. The end of the world for some may be in a drug-induced stupour and being drunk all the time, but not for the entire novel. There was no progression, no character growth, no nothing.
The poetic writing style of Worth, made this novel worth reading, it resonates within the reader, a somber tone, one that you feel you aren't going to come back from, this is this novel's saving grace.
Two stars... Two little stars all because the writing is amazing, and that is where the praise ends, although this is an incredibly diferent take on the end of the world, I found it lacking. The end of the world for some may be in a drug-induced stupour and being drunk all the time, but not for the entire novel. There was no progression, no character growth, no nothing.
The poetic writing style of Worth, made this novel worth reading, it resonates within the reader, a somber tone, one that you feel you aren't going to come back from, this is this novel's saving grace.
Read
November 20, 2013Review copy provided by NetGalley, on behalf of Now Or Never Publishing
Ang has long been living as close to death as she can, entranced by the music that seems to be channeling her very thoughts: dedicating her life to dying. When The End finally comes, all acid rain and ravenous dogs, she finds it's not what she expected. As the sole survivor of a suicide pact, she begins to wonder if she is the one who has tipped the universe off balance.
Ang has been broken her whole life, yet somehow the pieces cling together. She lives through this label, "killing time," she says, "until we kill ourselves." She's comes back to Vancouver, not dead, only to see the onset of The End. As the world goes from bizarre to hopeless the irony is painful, it's not far into the novel before Ang begins to question whether she is the reason the apocalypse has happened. Did she survive her suicide only to see the world to it's bitter end? Is this her punishment for not wanting to die enough?
Her life never loses it's mantra of "danger/destruction/detonation", these bands whom she listens to only give a soundtrack, channel the audiences thought, guide them. The anthems only remind her "that living as close to death as possible is the only way to feel alive."
Ang is timeless. A girl of our generation, born however many decades ago, she's a little more than twenty when the world begins to end. She's seeking the oblivion, finds her meaning, and then loses it. When a boy swaying to Shit Kitten's song 'PostApoc' says, "I was made to live in these times," she rolls her eyes. Those lyrics are a frequent thought for her as she reflects and acts. "It's my body and I can die if I want to."
It would be remiss not to mention that Liz Worth is knowledgeable of the punk scene in Toronto. Ang's travails are like bad trips while in the underground music scene or crashing at someone's house, but this is reality and the trips are worse. Her easy flow from dream to hallucination to minimal sobriety makes you question her, but Ang is surprisingly cognizant through the worst. This isn't a trick, Worth isn't out to make you question Ang, since the girl has enough thing she must figure out herself. It's not a train wreck you can't look away from, it's a high descent into the primeval world.
Her relationships are the strings of the story, her life related to strangers, to friends, to ghosts, to herself, always features another participant she was friends or lovers with. These connections, remembering the people who knew you, and now the people you knew who were gone, is all that's left of them. She's all that's left of them, and along the endless days and the sweltering winters, she wants something that keeps her going, to earn her that label of survivor. Because otherwise, she'll die.
I requested this from NetGalley on a whim, as I'm constantly trying to broaden my horizons. It was one of the 'instant-accept' offers they have out all the time, and therefore I was dubious, but liked the cover. It screams of it's intentions. The blurb reminded me of Go Ask Alice from my youth, and upon reading closing it, I was reminded of The Green Witch by Alice Hoffman which I read when it came out. I wanted to like PostApoc and I ended up loving it. I can't recommend this book to you too much. It's different than the aforementioned young adult books because it's written accurately without spinning out of our grasp. There's a time to write stream of consciousness of dreaming drug addicts and there's a time to write the thoughts of woman in a world going to hell.
Comparisons to those older books written for teenagers just doesn't do PostApoc justice. Someone compared this book to The Naked Lunch, that book which inspired the Beat poets and is still lauded today, but I'm not sure if PostApoc, with its pointedly unanswered questions, isn't better that that. This book is thought-provoking, and has become one of my favorite books. I look forward to revisiting it in the future.
Let me know if you think you will you be reading this book when it comes out. Are there any books you've felt 'woke you up'? Looking forward to your comments on this one, especially if you've read it!
184pp. Now or Never Publishing. 15 Oct 2013.
In the interim until next time, as always, more at auroralector.blogspot.com
Ang has long been living as close to death as she can, entranced by the music that seems to be channeling her very thoughts: dedicating her life to dying. When The End finally comes, all acid rain and ravenous dogs, she finds it's not what she expected. As the sole survivor of a suicide pact, she begins to wonder if she is the one who has tipped the universe off balance.
Ang has been broken her whole life, yet somehow the pieces cling together. She lives through this label, "killing time," she says, "until we kill ourselves." She's comes back to Vancouver, not dead, only to see the onset of The End. As the world goes from bizarre to hopeless the irony is painful, it's not far into the novel before Ang begins to question whether she is the reason the apocalypse has happened. Did she survive her suicide only to see the world to it's bitter end? Is this her punishment for not wanting to die enough?
Her life never loses it's mantra of "danger/destruction/detonation", these bands whom she listens to only give a soundtrack, channel the audiences thought, guide them. The anthems only remind her "that living as close to death as possible is the only way to feel alive."
Ang is timeless. A girl of our generation, born however many decades ago, she's a little more than twenty when the world begins to end. She's seeking the oblivion, finds her meaning, and then loses it. When a boy swaying to Shit Kitten's song 'PostApoc' says, "I was made to live in these times," she rolls her eyes. Those lyrics are a frequent thought for her as she reflects and acts. "It's my body and I can die if I want to."
It would be remiss not to mention that Liz Worth is knowledgeable of the punk scene in Toronto. Ang's travails are like bad trips while in the underground music scene or crashing at someone's house, but this is reality and the trips are worse. Her easy flow from dream to hallucination to minimal sobriety makes you question her, but Ang is surprisingly cognizant through the worst. This isn't a trick, Worth isn't out to make you question Ang, since the girl has enough thing she must figure out herself. It's not a train wreck you can't look away from, it's a high descent into the primeval world.
Her relationships are the strings of the story, her life related to strangers, to friends, to ghosts, to herself, always features another participant she was friends or lovers with. These connections, remembering the people who knew you, and now the people you knew who were gone, is all that's left of them. She's all that's left of them, and along the endless days and the sweltering winters, she wants something that keeps her going, to earn her that label of survivor. Because otherwise, she'll die.
This sense of travel, this transcendence of time-space-moments, is what Tooth would say is the result of disrupting the universe. I told him I'm not really supposed to be alive now and he said, "That makes more sense than anything I've ever heard."
I requested this from NetGalley on a whim, as I'm constantly trying to broaden my horizons. It was one of the 'instant-accept' offers they have out all the time, and therefore I was dubious, but liked the cover. It screams of it's intentions. The blurb reminded me of Go Ask Alice from my youth, and upon reading closing it, I was reminded of The Green Witch by Alice Hoffman which I read when it came out. I wanted to like PostApoc and I ended up loving it. I can't recommend this book to you too much. It's different than the aforementioned young adult books because it's written accurately without spinning out of our grasp. There's a time to write stream of consciousness of dreaming drug addicts and there's a time to write the thoughts of woman in a world going to hell.
Comparisons to those older books written for teenagers just doesn't do PostApoc justice. Someone compared this book to The Naked Lunch, that book which inspired the Beat poets and is still lauded today, but I'm not sure if PostApoc, with its pointedly unanswered questions, isn't better that that. This book is thought-provoking, and has become one of my favorite books. I look forward to revisiting it in the future.
Let me know if you think you will you be reading this book when it comes out. Are there any books you've felt 'woke you up'? Looking forward to your comments on this one, especially if you've read it!
184pp. Now or Never Publishing. 15 Oct 2013.
In the interim until next time, as always, more at auroralector.blogspot.com
February 2, 2014
PostApoc reads like an acid trip gone poetic in the middle of a concert you're not entirely sure you're at. It's haunting, thought provoking, and messy.
Liz Worth creates a world that is so gritty and profoundly disturbing that I could hardly stomach it. In fact I challenge any other author to write this world in any other way than the flowing stream of consciousness of Ang's, the narrator's, mind. It's such an awful reality, getting worse and worse, going back and forth from present day to the past and never a better future. And throughout the entire book you're halfway wondering if any of this is even real. Maybe Ang is on a trip, maybe she's delusional, hell maybe she's in a psych ward and I just don't know.
It was surrealism at it's best. Words painted like melting worlds gone wrong across paper in a book that simultaneously made you want to wake up, run away, from it's nightmare-esque landscape and keep keep looking on in morbid fascination to see what happened next.
Whatever it is? It's been a long time since a book has made me go: Look at yourself, look at your life choices. What do you want to be? What do you want your reality to be?
I'm not saying this is everyone's cup of tea. In fact most people will probably not be able to appreciate the wonderful nuances and creeptastic anti-fantasy of this book.
But if you're willing to give it a chance, holy shit. You'll fall in love.
To check out other reviews go to my blog Vicariously!
Liz Worth creates a world that is so gritty and profoundly disturbing that I could hardly stomach it. In fact I challenge any other author to write this world in any other way than the flowing stream of consciousness of Ang's, the narrator's, mind. It's such an awful reality, getting worse and worse, going back and forth from present day to the past and never a better future. And throughout the entire book you're halfway wondering if any of this is even real. Maybe Ang is on a trip, maybe she's delusional, hell maybe she's in a psych ward and I just don't know.
It was surrealism at it's best. Words painted like melting worlds gone wrong across paper in a book that simultaneously made you want to wake up, run away, from it's nightmare-esque landscape and keep keep looking on in morbid fascination to see what happened next.
Whatever it is? It's been a long time since a book has made me go: Look at yourself, look at your life choices. What do you want to be? What do you want your reality to be?
I'm not saying this is everyone's cup of tea. In fact most people will probably not be able to appreciate the wonderful nuances and creeptastic anti-fantasy of this book.
But if you're willing to give it a chance, holy shit. You'll fall in love.
To check out other reviews go to my blog Vicariously!
November 15, 2013
E-galley received through Netgalley for review.
Ang is the only survivor of a suicide pact. She lives day by day in Vancouver, "killing time, before time kills us". She's waiting for the end of the world. When the end comes, however, Ang and her friends survive, scavenging what they can to eat, picking up drugs, going to live events. The book is titled after a song of the band Shit Kittens, which had the lyrics: "It's my body and I'll die if I want to". This is a sort of motto for Ang.
I really had to force myself to end this book. I didn't enjoy it very much. At first, I was curious abotu the plot, but then I realized that there is not much plot going on. It's mostly Ang's sensations and thoughts as she navigates the ending world. She's practically always high (or on a low after getting high) and often has allucinations and/or weird dreams. She's entranged from her family, who tried to look after her after she survived the suicide pact, but failed. Ang often thinks about her boyfriend who died in the suicide pact, and wonders what life would have been for her if he had survived, too.
I suppose this could be a good book for other readers, but it simply wasn't for me.
Ang is the only survivor of a suicide pact. She lives day by day in Vancouver, "killing time, before time kills us". She's waiting for the end of the world. When the end comes, however, Ang and her friends survive, scavenging what they can to eat, picking up drugs, going to live events. The book is titled after a song of the band Shit Kittens, which had the lyrics: "It's my body and I'll die if I want to". This is a sort of motto for Ang.
I really had to force myself to end this book. I didn't enjoy it very much. At first, I was curious abotu the plot, but then I realized that there is not much plot going on. It's mostly Ang's sensations and thoughts as she navigates the ending world. She's practically always high (or on a low after getting high) and often has allucinations and/or weird dreams. She's entranged from her family, who tried to look after her after she survived the suicide pact, but failed. Ang often thinks about her boyfriend who died in the suicide pact, and wonders what life would have been for her if he had survived, too.
I suppose this could be a good book for other readers, but it simply wasn't for me.
February 2, 2014
If I could rate this book 3 and a half stars I think that would be fitting.
Liz Worth, fellow Canuck and Torontonian, creates the character "Ang", sole survivor of a suicide pact. The premise intrigued me and the amazing prose and imagery throughout is awesome.
So the end of the world is here; it happened. Squatters you become, wearing the same clothes, struggling for food, experiencing digestive problems and being sick. Dirty, desperate and lucid, it is the most true to life portrayal of the end-Hollywood take note.
This took me a while to read but she has a fan here. Believable,and honest, the author's love of the punk scene shines through, making me love each raw, stinky detail of Ang and her struggle to hold it together.
Check it out.
Liz Worth, fellow Canuck and Torontonian, creates the character "Ang", sole survivor of a suicide pact. The premise intrigued me and the amazing prose and imagery throughout is awesome.
So the end of the world is here; it happened. Squatters you become, wearing the same clothes, struggling for food, experiencing digestive problems and being sick. Dirty, desperate and lucid, it is the most true to life portrayal of the end-Hollywood take note.
This took me a while to read but she has a fan here. Believable,and honest, the author's love of the punk scene shines through, making me love each raw, stinky detail of Ang and her struggle to hold it together.
Check it out.
December 19, 2013
Reading this book made me want to die. I'm saying this in the nicest way possible. In postapocalyptic Toronto, everyone is becoming possessed, losing body parts and just plain disappearing. The world is at The End. Ang resisted death somehow in the heated moment of a major suicide pact, and thus she is left with life, to watch the world collapse. Toronto deteriorates, but Ang and her friends keep going, but only through drugged stupors. This novel is beautifully written in Worth's poetic language. It's a hazy, vague train of thought and it's fascinating. It leaves a lot to your imagination, to let your demons take over. You'll be gripped, wanting to know what will happen to the characters.
April 21, 2015
MapleBooks.ca: Book Reviews
Reading PostApoc I felt like I was rediscovering the Post-Apocalyptic genre. It was completely new and fresh… even though “fresh” might not be the word, since the novel dwells into the worst darkness and horror I’ve ever read. I even thought of qualifying PostApoc as a horror novel, but this would be beside the point: PostApoc leaves you sometimes terrified, disgusted, or despaired, but this is merely an unfortunate side-effect of the protagonist’s story.
First of all, PostApoc is not about heroic survival. Novels like I Am a Legend by Richard Matheson made me used to heroes putting so much efforts into staying alive by showing resilience, wit and an impressive will to live. In these stories, “survival” means to fight. Well, there’s nothing as such in PostApoc: Ang is simply too wasted to fight for anything. She is the sole survivor of a suicide pact and coping with her memories became her everyday challenge. Alcohol, drug, music concert, and sleeping in dumb her fears and anguishes down. This makes PostApoc‘s world small and closed, even claustrophobic: it revolves mainly around Ang’s house, if not only in Ang’s mind.
What made PostApoc so fascinating to me is how the End of the world came to challenge Ang’s beliefs. Before “the End” as they call it, she and her friends had embraced nihilism: everything was dark and pointless, death was an ideal. It was a way of life, an aesthetic choice, more than an actual perception of reality.
The whole novel is about how the happening of The End gives new meanings to Ang’s previous beliefs. Death, she realizes, is only about loss. The collapse of society is merely about hunger, disease, stray pets gone feral, empty streets, lack of water, soap, clothes, or anything to keep up a basic level of hygiene. PostApoc excels at making you uncomfortable and disgusted that Ang’s world of filth could stick to your fingers through the pages of the book.
Ang also meets real futility: all the romance and glamour of nihilism disappear as soon as there isn’t anyone left to talk about it. When there will be no future, nothing at all, it just becomes absurd to fantasize about it:
Ang’s core identity is shaken by the End. Even though she and her friends try to cling to the past and their old habits of drug and alcohol and music shows, the End comes to shatter their efforts. Ang is left to reconstruct a “healthy” and genuine relation to Death and to explore her memories.
Besides the story, I was totally taken away by Liz Worth’s beautiful style and incredible talent. Poetry and violence come together to give an extreme intensity to this novel. Everything is alive, raw, bleak and despaired. The author always finds the exact words and images to bring you to this world.
More often than not, you start wondering if the End could be a product of Ang’s insanity, a bad trip, or a nightmare. The poetic writing certainly makes you feel that reality is a bit warped. But all of a sudden, you’re snapped back to the gritty details of reality.
PostApoc was an amazing read. It is really intense and sometimes requires you to put the book down and take a deep breath. It’s dark, claustrophobic and full of despair, but it is also beautiful. The writing is spectacular and Ang’s slow questioning about her life and beliefs are truly fascinating.
Reading PostApoc I felt like I was rediscovering the Post-Apocalyptic genre. It was completely new and fresh… even though “fresh” might not be the word, since the novel dwells into the worst darkness and horror I’ve ever read. I even thought of qualifying PostApoc as a horror novel, but this would be beside the point: PostApoc leaves you sometimes terrified, disgusted, or despaired, but this is merely an unfortunate side-effect of the protagonist’s story.
First of all, PostApoc is not about heroic survival. Novels like I Am a Legend by Richard Matheson made me used to heroes putting so much efforts into staying alive by showing resilience, wit and an impressive will to live. In these stories, “survival” means to fight. Well, there’s nothing as such in PostApoc: Ang is simply too wasted to fight for anything. She is the sole survivor of a suicide pact and coping with her memories became her everyday challenge. Alcohol, drug, music concert, and sleeping in dumb her fears and anguishes down. This makes PostApoc‘s world small and closed, even claustrophobic: it revolves mainly around Ang’s house, if not only in Ang’s mind.
What made PostApoc so fascinating to me is how the End of the world came to challenge Ang’s beliefs. Before “the End” as they call it, she and her friends had embraced nihilism: everything was dark and pointless, death was an ideal. It was a way of life, an aesthetic choice, more than an actual perception of reality.
"We obsessed over self-destruction because that’s just what you did in those days. Even if they didn’t want to admit it, there were so many people who were ready to die. It was romance for a jaded generation."
The whole novel is about how the happening of The End gives new meanings to Ang’s previous beliefs. Death, she realizes, is only about loss. The collapse of society is merely about hunger, disease, stray pets gone feral, empty streets, lack of water, soap, clothes, or anything to keep up a basic level of hygiene. PostApoc excels at making you uncomfortable and disgusted that Ang’s world of filth could stick to your fingers through the pages of the book.
Ang also meets real futility: all the romance and glamour of nihilism disappear as soon as there isn’t anyone left to talk about it. When there will be no future, nothing at all, it just becomes absurd to fantasize about it:
"There will be no news stories about all this, no books in the aftermath, praising us survivors as heroes. There will be no after at all."
Ang’s core identity is shaken by the End. Even though she and her friends try to cling to the past and their old habits of drug and alcohol and music shows, the End comes to shatter their efforts. Ang is left to reconstruct a “healthy” and genuine relation to Death and to explore her memories.
Besides the story, I was totally taken away by Liz Worth’s beautiful style and incredible talent. Poetry and violence come together to give an extreme intensity to this novel. Everything is alive, raw, bleak and despaired. The author always finds the exact words and images to bring you to this world.
"On Shelbourn Street a house shrugged and yawned, its front door wide open and an old red carpet flashed from its inside like a tongue. Its frame was aloof and unattached and right there for us to take, at least for a night.
From under the push of English’s boot on its wooden porch step came a creak that was almost a cry, a surprised sound like the house had forgotten what it was like to have someone walk into it."
More often than not, you start wondering if the End could be a product of Ang’s insanity, a bad trip, or a nightmare. The poetic writing certainly makes you feel that reality is a bit warped. But all of a sudden, you’re snapped back to the gritty details of reality.
PostApoc was an amazing read. It is really intense and sometimes requires you to put the book down and take a deep breath. It’s dark, claustrophobic and full of despair, but it is also beautiful. The writing is spectacular and Ang’s slow questioning about her life and beliefs are truly fascinating.
September 3, 2019
Publié sur le webzine Les Méconnus
Liz Worth signe un roman étonnant chez XYZ Éditeur cet automne : Avant que tout s’effondre. Ang, une jeune adulte, tente de survivre dans un monde post apocalyptique glauque où il n’y a plus aucune règle qui subsiste. C’est la loi du plus fort et du plus sournois qui s’installe dans cette ville du futur.
Ang, avant même cette apocalypse, était portée par un désir d’autodestruction très intense. « On était obsédés par l’autodestruction parce que c’était la chose à faire. Même s’ils ne voulaient pas se l’avouer, il y avait tellement de gens qui étaient prêts à mourir. C’était le romantisme d’une génération désabusée. »
Elle fait la rencontre de Hunter, leader d’un groupe punk marginal, avec qui elle conclut un pacte de suicide. Ces jeunes, souvent drogués et désillusionnés, ne savent plus vers quoi se tourner pour rester en vie, pour croire en quelque chose. Finalement, elle survit seulement pour être témoin de l’apocalypse: une sécheresse suivie de pluie acide où les corps des gens implosent. Son attachement à Hunter reste profond et est mué par un amour malsain autant qu’adorateur : « Je me suis toujours demandé combien de fois j’allais souhaiter qu’il ne l’ait pas fait. Ou combien de fois j’allais souhaiter finir ce qu’il avait commencé. »
Après la «Fin», certains groupes musicaux subsistent et s’élèvent au rang de religion pour ceux qui ont survécu. Le groupe Shit Kitten désire devenir le Nouvel Ordre mondial : « Le nouvel ordre mondial: un prélude / Quand le dernier jour sera écrit, le monde brandira deux pages et ils diront SHIT KITTEN. Et vous vous tiendrez autour de nous, souriant avec vos dents qui pourraient découper des étoiles. Le véritable nouvel ordre mondial: un féminifeste / Ceci n’est pas une conspiration, mais un nettoyage, une table rase. Quand le Nouveau Monde émergera, seuls les plus forts resteront. » Ang adhère à cette pensée, mais n’hésite pas à poursuivre sur sa voie d’autodestruction en abusant d’une drogue appelée grayline : un mélange de champignon et de cendre humaine.
C’est donc dire que ce n’est pas un esprit de survie qui la meut, mais plutôt ce désir d’autodestruction toujours aussi fort. Et avec raison: le monde dépeint par Liz Worth est sans merci, sans espoir et d’une cruauté terrorisante. C’est un des points forts du roman : les descriptions du monde sont fortes et le langage utilisé pour en parler est cru et sans détour, à l’image du roman. Le monde de terreur nourrit l’atmosphère, ce qui teinte l’écriture. L’un nourrit l’autre, parfois de surréalisme, parfois de poésie, souvent d’horreur. Liz Worth a su doser le tout afin de donner un roman intéressant pour les fans de ce genre ou pour ceux qui voudraient s’y initier.
Liz Worth signe un roman étonnant chez XYZ Éditeur cet automne : Avant que tout s’effondre. Ang, une jeune adulte, tente de survivre dans un monde post apocalyptique glauque où il n’y a plus aucune règle qui subsiste. C’est la loi du plus fort et du plus sournois qui s’installe dans cette ville du futur.
Ang, avant même cette apocalypse, était portée par un désir d’autodestruction très intense. « On était obsédés par l’autodestruction parce que c’était la chose à faire. Même s’ils ne voulaient pas se l’avouer, il y avait tellement de gens qui étaient prêts à mourir. C’était le romantisme d’une génération désabusée. »
Elle fait la rencontre de Hunter, leader d’un groupe punk marginal, avec qui elle conclut un pacte de suicide. Ces jeunes, souvent drogués et désillusionnés, ne savent plus vers quoi se tourner pour rester en vie, pour croire en quelque chose. Finalement, elle survit seulement pour être témoin de l’apocalypse: une sécheresse suivie de pluie acide où les corps des gens implosent. Son attachement à Hunter reste profond et est mué par un amour malsain autant qu’adorateur : « Je me suis toujours demandé combien de fois j’allais souhaiter qu’il ne l’ait pas fait. Ou combien de fois j’allais souhaiter finir ce qu’il avait commencé. »
Après la «Fin», certains groupes musicaux subsistent et s’élèvent au rang de religion pour ceux qui ont survécu. Le groupe Shit Kitten désire devenir le Nouvel Ordre mondial : « Le nouvel ordre mondial: un prélude / Quand le dernier jour sera écrit, le monde brandira deux pages et ils diront SHIT KITTEN. Et vous vous tiendrez autour de nous, souriant avec vos dents qui pourraient découper des étoiles. Le véritable nouvel ordre mondial: un féminifeste / Ceci n’est pas une conspiration, mais un nettoyage, une table rase. Quand le Nouveau Monde émergera, seuls les plus forts resteront. » Ang adhère à cette pensée, mais n’hésite pas à poursuivre sur sa voie d’autodestruction en abusant d’une drogue appelée grayline : un mélange de champignon et de cendre humaine.
C’est donc dire que ce n’est pas un esprit de survie qui la meut, mais plutôt ce désir d’autodestruction toujours aussi fort. Et avec raison: le monde dépeint par Liz Worth est sans merci, sans espoir et d’une cruauté terrorisante. C’est un des points forts du roman : les descriptions du monde sont fortes et le langage utilisé pour en parler est cru et sans détour, à l’image du roman. Le monde de terreur nourrit l’atmosphère, ce qui teinte l’écriture. L’un nourrit l’autre, parfois de surréalisme, parfois de poésie, souvent d’horreur. Liz Worth a su doser le tout afin de donner un roman intéressant pour les fans de ce genre ou pour ceux qui voudraient s’y initier.
May 4, 2014
'PostApoc' finds our protagonist Ang struggling in a world that has seemingly died with a whimper, not a bang. There are no zombies, or cataclysms here (except for the dwindling supplies and population). In fact, we're left wondering what happened. With an unreliable narrator looking for her next high, we're left with missing chunks of time and an otherworldly narrative that is poetic and untethered.
After being the sole survivor of a suicide pact, Ang finds herself immersed in an underground music scene obsessed with the end of the world. When that finally happens, at first Ang and her friends don't notice because of the intoxicated lifestyle they choose. They live in a supposedly haunted flophouse where the neighborhood dogs are fighting to survive. As clothing, food, alcohol and even makeup become scarce commodities, Ang and her friends are forced (or willing) to make trades for the items they need and crave. At first, as electricity still sometimes works, there is time to go see a favorite band, but the slow erosion of everything takes it's toll on everyone.
It's possibly the most gritty exploration of life in a post apocalyptic world I've ever read. Dirt is everywhere, foodstuffs are questionable, yet still eaten, and bathing is a waste of drinking water. The book feels like it has a layer of grit on it an eighth of an inch thick and seems to laugh at our world of hygiene and antibacterial soap. The fictional drug greyline, which Ang and her friends are addicted to, has a seriously bad set of side effects. This is not a book for the squeamish. I can't call it a straight out horror novel (although it must be) because the prose is so trippingly wonderful. There are passages that are simply beautiful in their description of a dying world. I was held captive by this book and it haunted my dreams. This is definitely a writer I will seek out.
I was given a review copy of this book by Now Or Never Publishing Company and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this unforgettable and haunting book.
After being the sole survivor of a suicide pact, Ang finds herself immersed in an underground music scene obsessed with the end of the world. When that finally happens, at first Ang and her friends don't notice because of the intoxicated lifestyle they choose. They live in a supposedly haunted flophouse where the neighborhood dogs are fighting to survive. As clothing, food, alcohol and even makeup become scarce commodities, Ang and her friends are forced (or willing) to make trades for the items they need and crave. At first, as electricity still sometimes works, there is time to go see a favorite band, but the slow erosion of everything takes it's toll on everyone.
It's possibly the most gritty exploration of life in a post apocalyptic world I've ever read. Dirt is everywhere, foodstuffs are questionable, yet still eaten, and bathing is a waste of drinking water. The book feels like it has a layer of grit on it an eighth of an inch thick and seems to laugh at our world of hygiene and antibacterial soap. The fictional drug greyline, which Ang and her friends are addicted to, has a seriously bad set of side effects. This is not a book for the squeamish. I can't call it a straight out horror novel (although it must be) because the prose is so trippingly wonderful. There are passages that are simply beautiful in their description of a dying world. I was held captive by this book and it haunted my dreams. This is definitely a writer I will seek out.
I was given a review copy of this book by Now Or Never Publishing Company and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this unforgettable and haunting book.
November 25, 2015
La fin du monde n’épargnera personne, pas même les junkies. Ang est une jeune punk en peine d’amour et en convalescence d’un suicide collectif dont elle est la seule survivante. Elle erre au cœur de la catastrophe inexpliquée, cherchant sa prochaine dose et un peu de réconfort humain. Ce n’est pas une lecture facile. La narration manque d’attention, comme si stone, saute sans fil conducteur d’un moment à l’autre. On y entend des grattements, des fantômes et des concerts de musique. C’est noir foncé, des filles sont violées et y retournent. Les jeunes gobent du grayline, mélange peu inspiré et encore moins inspirant d’héroïne et de cendre humaine.
Les apparents illogismes des comportements suicidaires d’Ang et de sa troupe ne peuvent être compris que par ceux ayant frôlée ou foncée dans la toxicomanie, autrement, c’est choquant et ça semble gratuit.
L’irritant de ce livre est que la seule intrique est celle que se donne le lecteur : « comment ça va finir? ».
Ce livre est un poème trash écrit en prose.
Je ne l’ai pas abandonné.
Les apparents illogismes des comportements suicidaires d’Ang et de sa troupe ne peuvent être compris que par ceux ayant frôlée ou foncée dans la toxicomanie, autrement, c’est choquant et ça semble gratuit.
L’irritant de ce livre est que la seule intrique est celle que se donne le lecteur : « comment ça va finir? ».
Ce livre est un poème trash écrit en prose.
Je ne l’ai pas abandonné.
July 13, 2014
I think this may be one of the weirdest books I've ever read. Like holy shit some of the things she describes are so fucking gross it'll make your skin crawl to china. Overall it made a good read for early bus trips.
September 1, 2015
*love* this book. wonderfully written, a beautiful, awful, surreal story. very caitlin r kiernan, and that is an excellent thing. there are thank you's at the end to rozz williams & the cocteau twins - !! i can hear them in a potential soundtrack to PostApoc.
miss worth - more, please.
miss worth - more, please.
September 16, 2013
Review forthcoming.
September 7, 2013
One of the best books I've ever read... Here is my review...
http://jasonehodges.blogspot.com/2013...
http://jasonehodges.blogspot.com/2013...
October 14, 2013
Don't miss this beautifully written book. In coming face-to-face with a suicide pact, the themes in the book are fascinating and well-worth the time devoted to reading this special novel.
October 29, 2013
Not you daughter's distopia. This was a really dark read, though filled with poetic imagery. Imagine, if you will McCarthy's The Road, but with young women, drugs, and death cults in Toronto.
Read
February 13, 2016Melancholy decay, set in Toronto. Dreamy. Grimy. post apocalyptic (duh)
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews