Now or Never Publishing, 184 pages, paperback, $19.95

Sometimes I talk to myself. Here’s a recent conversation:

Me: Hey, man, this book just came in the mail.

Me: Yeah? Tough luck, I have a ton to read. What is it about?

Me: It’s a post-apocalyptic story about…

Me: Nope, not gonna happen. I need another dose of post-apocalyptic fiction like I need…

Me. It’s by Liz Worth.

Me: Liz Worth? Yeah, put that one at the top of the pile.

PostApoc follows Ang, the sole survivor of a suicide pact. Ang left her home in the suburbs to live for music. Friends, drugs, clubs, and music became her life as part of the underground music scene. The entire movement seemed obsessed with the idea of the end of the world, and they got it. Something happened and the world changed. Unfortunately, when the end came, Ang and her friends didn’t find in it the liberation they expected. Instead, they found themselves transitioning into a decimated, slow, painful live marked by danger, uncertainty, filth, and hunger. They all live together and still manage to get high and go to a show once in a while, but their existence is more about finding food, the lack of water and electricity, starving, and trying to make sense of themselves and of a world that seems to become more unhinged with each passing day.

Worth is an accomplished poet, and the same marvelous command of the language her poetry shows is also on display here. However, despite the beautiful writing and undeniable musicality of the prose, the writing in PostApoc is infinitely darker than anything the author has previously published. In this narrative, physical needs and psychological stability and first explored and then destroyed. Ang is living in a crazy place, and her sanity seems to dance at the edge of oblivion.

Besides the darkness and desperation, PostApoc is a must-read because it brings together poetry, surrealism, horror, post-apocalyptic fiction, and punk rock. The world ended, but music is still alive, and those who lived for it before still find miracles and a sense of community in its presence:

“White Doom spiral into ‘White Cat’ but I must be in a trance, must actually be inside the songs instead of in front of them, because when you get inside there is no distinguishing one song from the next. This band is reducing us all to a single consciousness, a new collective consciousness, and right now I do believe that this is the culmination of everything we’ve been dying for, that this moment is the whole point of The End and everyone here, that we are the lucky ones, the ones that are crossing over.”

A surprising element of this book, and one that makes me recommend it immediately to fans of dark fiction, is the stunning way Worth deals with ugliness. I read a lot of books that feature vomiting, and this is the first book that has vomiting that I would recommend to readers who don’t like that. Also, there are a few passages that bring bizarre/creepy/horrific images that stick with you long after the last page has been turned:

“I fall asleep and dream within a dream. A spiral in the sand. One spiral leads to another to another to another, and from those come worms, each thicker than the last, all glistening. Sand flakes off their bodies. Their mouths are wide, trying to scream.”

More than about the end of civilization, PostApoc is about music, survival, searching for humanity in the ruins of a place where it maybe never existed, and being strung out. This is a novel with a black heart made of poetry.

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Gabino Iglesias is writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.