If you try to categorize this book, you will likely come. up short. Yes, literary fiction, yes, suspense/horror, yes, race, class, and money. All set in the remotest Hamptons-adjacent Air BNB in lieu of the usual cabin in the woods (btw that rental price was pretty good, I thought, for a week). Something has gone wrong, is going wrong, but no one knows what it is, because (duh, duh, duh) the phones, internet, landlines and tv are all out. Naturally, strangers come a-knocking at the door in the middle of the night.
Well, what transpires next is not what you expect. I have never hidden a review for spoilers previously on Goodreads, but I can't otherwise mention that this book reminded me quite a bit of Neville Shute's classic, "On the Beach."
Other thoughts: It's more compelling than enjoyable, and as they say, "you can't put it down."Readable in one day.

This novel had me at a blackout. An event that on a right (very wrong) scale can seem positively apocalyptic and a good apocalypse is fun to enjoy so long as it remains fictional. So that’s why I requested it on Netgalley, but then I forgot the plot summary by the time I went to read it. Often a good thing, but this time the novel had me seriously reconsidering selecting it for the first 11% or so, the three page grocery list alone was a perfect epitome of how much the writing didn’t work for me. It was objectively good. Detailed, psychologically clever and all that, but viscerally as unpleasant and unlikeable as the characters and (as the grocery list hints at) overreliant on the minutest of details. From the start you are introduced to a perfect vacation of a perfect stereotypically white Brooklynites, a well to do family, 2 parents, 2 teenage kids. They’ve rented a place in a remote area of Long Island, away from civilization and are all set to enjoy their family time, with all their food. So far…nothing interesting. And then in the middle of the night or at least too late to be polite, an older black couple shows up. The Washingtons. Turns out the Washingtons own the place and are even more well to do than their renters, thus defying so many cultural and racial stereotypes that are constantly cropping up in the narrative. Turns out there’s been a huge blackout in NYC and the Washingtons thought it would be safer to weather the event in the remote safety of their beach abode. Only now everyone has to share. An awkward situation, made all the more difficult by heightened emotions and fears. The author makes the most of it, but playing up the dramatics, race, class, financial brackets, the way they define reactions and experiences. The unnaturalness of the very concept of sharing when it really matters. And that’s about all one can talk about safely without giving too much away. Suffice it to say it’s a very bleak book and it succeeds at ratcheting up the claustrophobic bleakness until the very end. Genre wise it’s very much literary fiction, but psychologically it’s actually quite horrific and very effectively so. The writing style didn’t quite work for me, personally, the entire read was just viscerally unpleasant. Not because it was bleak and scary and claustrophobic, though are actually all good things in my books, just the way the author went about it. But like it or not, the quality is undeniable and easy to appreciate, objectively. This book has a lot to say, it does so against a striking setting and it exercises notable restraint, so it’s a pretty subtle nightmare. Not sure if that’s a recommendation or not, certainly more of an acquired taste sort of read. I’m the first to review this book on GR and I understand this isn’t the most enthusiastic of reviews, though I did strive for objectivity, it, of course, inevitably reflects a very personal reading experience. Much like it ought to. Thanks Netgalley.

Wow! What an incredibly creative premise for this novel! A family renting a vacation home receives a knock on the door, and it is the owners of the home who live full time in NYC. Something has happened, a blackout of some sort and feeling uneasy, they headed to a place they felt safe, their country home. This alone is genius! But things spin out of control., as something "BIG" has happened, but cut off from television, internet, and phone service, they have no idea what. This is a "can't put it down," "what in the world is going on" kind of novel. I loved reading this and devoured it in a day. However, I was not happy with the lack of a conclusion...or rather one only alluded to. Also, there is something strange with the way this novel is written. In general, it has a very straight forward style. But every so often, these SAT vocabulary words are thrown in that stick out like a sore thumb.. Here's a few examples: dishabillie, odalisques, vinyasa, geegaw, apparatchiks, connubial (more than once), etc. I read voraciously. I love coming upon a word I haven't seen before. But these were so out of place in this novel (and so frequent) that they became comical to me...and somewhat distracting. So much so I even discussed it with my husband! This is an ARC, so maybe the vocabulary will be cleaned up a bit before publication. In the end, this is worth a read even though in these days of quarantine, it is a bit unnerving. But be prepared for a bit of a let down in the end, and be prepared to have a dictionary at hand :) Thank you NetGalley and HarperCollins for providing a digital ARC for review.