I Read Books: Sunbathers by Lindz McLeod

 

Sunbathers

The end of the world came, with sun flares. Everyone had to take shelter from them. Everyone? Some stayed out, deliberately. Most died but some survived, changed, transformed. Burned clean. Stronger and more powerful than before, though vulnerable to the darkness of night.

They encourage others to join them and they do. And one day they decide they are better, and drag people out, conscripting them, or destroying them. Tearing down the buildings that protect the humans, digging them out of their holes.

Soph lives in a hole in the ground, a warren, a burrow with other survivors. With occasional lovers. With people who will hold her back if they have to run. If the Sunbathers find them. They can go out at night to scavenge for food, to collect the water they’ve left to be sterilised by sunlight. Soph finds where the Sunbathers have been eating human flesh and when they discover they have poisoned the other food she eats it. She gets off on the idea with her sexually subservient burrow-mate Eilidh. She is desperate to survive, but does not believe in any of the plans of the others, to take a boat to the Canary Islands, to go down a mine.

The Sunbathers call them worms or friends of the dark. And they catch Soph. Who turns, turns on her burrow-mates, her fellow-worms, her lover. Who begs for the chance to be put out in the sun and transformed. To have her sins and weaknesses burned away.

But being a superhuman, a Sunbather, a creature of light and purity is not the escape she hoped for and feared. Soph’s gay, and Sunbathers aren’t; in fact they have a weekly ritual called The Flowering when male Sunbathers penetrate female ones. All together but otherwise conventionally. It does nothing for Soph. They are bound by convention, trapped in their own way as much as the worms were back in their burrow.

Soph isn’t going to be a hero. Even now she’s been purified, her human weaknesses burned away. But she’s not going to be like the others, on the straight and narrow. They’re building a Lamp that will banish the darkness and let them walk all the time. For eternity.

Soph’s not up for that.

A story of cannibalism, betrayal, gruesome murder, homophobia, gritty lesbian sex and how even when the world ends you can’t escape yourself. And why would you want to? You’ve come to terms with it, even if you are a monster.

Not as much of a monster as the sun-powered-anti-vampires though.

Read This: Gay apocalyptic monster horror unafraid to look through the eyes of a selfish and desperate narrator
Don’t Read This: The world ends, people are eaten, and you still can’t get away from boring conformists
I Read A Complimentary Review Copy: From Hedone Books