Last One at the Party: a post-apocalyptic novel that hit home…hard

Just in case you weren’t sure what’s going on, or are reading from the future (is it nice there?), there’s a pandemic happening, and Bethany Clift’s debut novel Last One at the Party is set in 2023 when a pandemic wipes out the world. Close to the bone, huh?

Yeah. And this happens to be the first book where Covid-19, the effects, the restrictions and the particular ways in which the US and UK governments have handled the pandemic have been directly named and referenced in a book that I’ve read. I didn’t know if I could handle it.

Here’s the full synopsis:

THE END OF EVERYTHING WAS HER BEGINNING

It's December 2023 and the world as we know it has ended.

The human race has been wiped out by a virus called 6DM ('Six Days Maximum' - the longest you've got before your body destroys itself).

But somehow, in London, one woman is still alive. A woman who has spent her whole life compromising what she wants, hiding how she feels and desperately trying to fit in. A woman who is entirely unprepared to face a future on her own.

Now, with only an abandoned golden retriever for company, she must travel through burning cities, avoiding rotting corpses and ravenous rats on a final journey to discover if she really is the last surviving person on earth.

And with no one else to live for, who will she become now that she's completely alone?

As I said, super intense. so fair warning that if this is something that you can’t deal with yet, give this book a pass for now, but do come back to it at a later date because it’s brilliant.

I wasn’t sure myself whether I was going to be able to read this because it was so visceral and close to the bone, but Clift’s writing is so strong and so distinct that I kept going, and I’m really glad I did. 

As the story develops, it moves further from our pandemic reality and into the post-apocalyptic pandemic of fiction (thankfully) but with an alarming edge of ‘we’re so lucky that wasn’t us...this time’ that’s deeply uncomfortable and racks up the tension even higher. I read Ling Ma’s Severance during the early days of the pandemic and while that had a similar set up, it had a different effect on me; it felt more distant and fictional being set in NYC and having read it during the early months of Covid. Last One at the Party was set right here at home, however, and it went hard. The sections set in a barren, desolated London reminded me a lot of similar scenes from The Day of the Triffids with the shops ready to be pillaged and the unnatural emptiness of a city usually chaotic with sound and life. 

The biggest shock with this novel was the body horror, and how much of it there was. I know it’s a post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but WOW. Clift did not shy away from the reality of a world where everyone suffered immensely and died with no infrastructure left to take care of it. It was a lot and make me feel a bit sick every now and then, but I do think it enhanced the atmosphere weirdly. It was an integral part of the narrator’s (we never learn her name) experience and survival alone in a new world. But also, so gross…

I only have two issues that stopped it being a five star: the ‘plot twist’ and the ending.

I’m going to talk about both of those things now so SPOILER WARNING for the latter half of the novel for the rest of this post.

The twist of the narrator’s surprise pregnancy was one I saw a mile off and I think it’s an immensely overused twist or reveal; it’s predictable and even a bit lazy in my opinion. I understand why it was used, and it was needed to trigger the change in the narrator’s attitude and need to survive for the rest of the novel. However, it’s a trope that I, personally, loathe and it really grated on me for a while.

I found the ending a little frustrating as there wasn’t much in the way of resolution and it left lots of open questions. I get it, it was a narrative choice that made total sense in the structure of the novel, but it wasn’t a satisfying end to the story for me and I was a bit annoyed with it. Did they survive? Where did they go after they left the journal? Why weren’t they collected with the other survivors? There’s a big possibility of a sequel to this and I really do hope there is one because I need to know. 

I do highly recommend this though if you can handle the intense pandemic setting and body horror, however. The writing is really something special and I can’t wait to see what Bethany Clift writes next. 

Have you managed to read pandemic or post-apocalyptic novels since the world broke?

Written by Sophie

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