Marisha Pessl’s Neverworld Wake Is a Shape-Shifting Binge Read
Some stories are all in the setup: what you need to know about their plot is in the teaser copy, and the pleasure is in watching the tale unfold. And some books use their setup to tease plot, employing it as a launchpad into all the mysteries that come next.
And some books destroy the launchpad as they shoot into the stratosphere, never to come down again, lighting the sky on fire in their wake and flipping you off through the back window of their rocket ship.
If this metaphor sucks, it’s because Marisha Pessl just Vitamixed my brain, and I loved it.
Building off an exciting but seemingly familiar setup—Groundhog’s Day with a sci-fi twist—Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Night Film) creates in YA debut Neverworld Wake a cracked universe that quickly dispenses with the obvious, to get going on the business of creating something new. Through a chain of events I’ll leave for you to discover, her five characters—former high school classmates, the remainder of a disbanded clique whose sixth member died under mysterious circumstances—have found themselves trapped in a splinter in the fabric of time, unable to move forward or even to die, until they reach a consensus: only one of them is allowed to survive this time glitch, this “Neverworld Wake,” and according to the Keeper, their neglectful spirit guide through hell, they have to vote near-unanimously on who that survivor will be.
Pessl allows her characters to exhaust the easy narrative options first: running away—by plane, by car, on foot—getting drunk, getting angry, getting self-destructive. Votes are cast, of course, but everyone votes for themselves. As the days pass without passing, things get weirder. Whitley and Cannon, a former couple infamous for their manipulations, their hedonism, and her rages, seek out an enclosed playground for their shared proclivities. Kipling, a soulful southerner with a rough past, makes himself into a passing stranger’s guardian angel. And Martha, a brilliant scientific mind, sets off on a confounding analytical journey our heroine, Beatrice, can’t parse. Beatrice, whose magnetic composer boyfriend, Jim, was the dead sixth member of their group, watches as her former friends spin out, terrified they’ll scatter so far out of range that a vote will never be cast, leaving them trapped in an eleven-hour hell.
That eleven-hour span becomes a setting of its own, a nihilistic pocket universe where nothing changes and nothing sticks, and the five teens can move like ghosts or goons, all-knowing and free from consequence. But, though time stands still, the characters don’t, bearing the accrued mental scars of months (years? Decades?) trapped inside a single day. Then, just when you start to think Jim’s death was a MacGuffin, Pessl employs it like a third-act gun. The book mutates again, the stakes get higher, the universe goes deeper, and yet another genre is spliced into the DNA of an already wild tale.
To say more would be to spoil this book’s endless surprises. It’s a “clear your calendar” kind of one-day read, singular as both a psychological thriller and a new addition to Pessl’s uncategorizable canon.
Neverworld Wake is on sale June 5, and available for pre-order now.