Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
Review by Eve Taft.
The dark, quiet room is an oasis. I work on breathing like my therapist taught me: deep slow inbreaths, longer outbreaths. Ashley’s downstairs, after asking me several times if I want him to stay, but he’s gotten me through the worst of it, and honestly, I can feel a nap coming on as the panic attack adrenaline evaporates.
I make a mental note to stick the book on his shelf, so he’ll pick it up when he has time. Leave the World Behind might have pushed me into an anxiety spiral, and I’m putting off fully analyzing it until my heartrate slows down, but it’s good. It’s included on so many lists of pulpy thrillers (which I’ve been inhaling lately, somehow, the woman on forty mg of Prozac a day is obsessed with twisty, psychological stories), but it doesn’t belong there. I’m not criticizing mysteries I can read in a day and rarely think about again—I love them, and they might be the biggest part of my book budget—but this is something more. Like Sharp Objects, the last thriller that Ashley had to calm me down after, Leave the World Behind disturbs the reader on a fundamental level and stays with them.
It’s hard to do: scare someone who’s always scared. When you use coping skills just to go through the daily business of being a person, ghosts and ghouls have to work pretty hard to rattle you. I love horror and thriller novels, not least for the relief at the end, relief that my real-life anxiety disorder rarely affords me. That’s how I found this book, trawling through lists of thrillers that I cherry-pick from and add to my Goodreads list. There’s plenty of good creepy stuff out there. But this was something extraordinary.
One MA in Creative Writing later, I want to pick it apart, figure out exactly how Rumaan Alam has set each one of my nerves on edge, distill the fear into a formula. But instead, I focus on what it did to me, how the story trickles down from my brain, where it lives now, to my body. That’s another therapy project: learn to live in my body, rather than view it as something alien that I puppeteer from my brain. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m so overwhelmed by the writing: it’s visceral. Food, sex, illness, injury—all of it is stomach-churningly real. The book floods your senses, forcing you to feel what the characters—because this is a dizzyingly third-person-omniscient narrator—are feeling. In the beginning, you’re lulled into sun-kissed contentment (a classic technique: establish the calm happiness and then shatter it, but Alam does it with such skill he may as well have invented the skill). Then the fear and pain, the teeth falling out like water, the driving through fields, lost and increasingly more terrified, the feeling of going to bed with strangers in your home...all of them crowd the reader’s senses.
I’ve heard, many times, that anxiety backs up in your system and causes the gears to stick because your brain reacts to danger where there isn’t any. Alam has weaponized that tendency by writing a frightening book in which very little actually happens. Our protagonists rent an air bnb on Long Island. Midway through their festivities, two people claiming to the home’s owners appear saying that something has happened in New York City, some sort of blackout, and instead of going home, they came out to their summer place.
It’s an eerie premise, sure—akin to The Invitation and mother! both of which are excellent horror films. But where the films build to terrifying climaxes, Leave the World Behind gives us fewer answers. All the time, Alam is giving us information none of the characters are privy to—telling us who will later die in a government encampment, who else’s teeth are beginning to loosen, what the planes are doing overhead—but never why. Stephen King uses this terror-inducing omniscience, the little hints sprinkled in through the work, and as a Constant Reader I’m familiar with it, but it works on me every time.
There’s something to say about commentary on our dependence on technology, some analysis of apocalyptic literature in the 21st century, particularly post-2020, the kind of commentary that places the book in its context, because it sure as hell knows exactly when and where it’s set. But for me, the book is simply about constant, vague terror. It’s a few hundred pages of a violin bow’s scraping, and in the end, we get no satisfying come-down. The writer uses language to unsettle the reader. The writer is successful. There’s more to the book than that, of course, but that’s its core.
And after I closed it, I ended up in the throes of an anxiety attack. The credit doesn’t all go to the book, of course, there’s genetic factors, a global pandemic, and the general chaos of life that helped push me over the edge, but Leave the World Behind was a variable into today’s panic. I’m recommending it, from below the covers, in the cool, dark room where Ashley eased me into bed and got me calmed down. I give it the highest praise possible from a horror writer with anxiety: this book absolutely terrified me.
The dark, quiet room is an oasis. I work on breathing like my therapist taught me: deep slow inbreaths, longer outbreaths. Ashley’s downstairs, after asking me several times if I want him to stay, but he’s gotten me through the worst of it, and honestly, I can feel a nap coming on as the panic attack adrenaline evaporates.
I make a mental note to stick the book on his shelf, so he’ll pick it up when he has time. Leave the World Behind might have pushed me into an anxiety spiral, and I’m putting off fully analyzing it until my heartrate slows down, but it’s good. It’s included on so many lists of pulpy thrillers (which I’ve been inhaling lately, somehow, the woman on forty mg of Prozac a day is obsessed with twisty, psychological stories), but it doesn’t belong there. I’m not criticizing mysteries I can read in a day and rarely think about again—I love them, and they might be the biggest part of my book budget—but this is something more. Like Sharp Objects, the last thriller that Ashley had to calm me down after, Leave the World Behind disturbs the reader on a fundamental level and stays with them.
It’s hard to do: scare someone who’s always scared. When you use coping skills just to go through the daily business of being a person, ghosts and ghouls have to work pretty hard to rattle you. I love horror and thriller novels, not least for the relief at the end, relief that my real-life anxiety disorder rarely affords me. That’s how I found this book, trawling through lists of thrillers that I cherry-pick from and add to my Goodreads list. There’s plenty of good creepy stuff out there. But this was something extraordinary.
One MA in Creative Writing later, I want to pick it apart, figure out exactly how Rumaan Alam has set each one of my nerves on edge, distill the fear into a formula. But instead, I focus on what it did to me, how the story trickles down from my brain, where it lives now, to my body. That’s another therapy project: learn to live in my body, rather than view it as something alien that I puppeteer from my brain. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m so overwhelmed by the writing: it’s visceral. Food, sex, illness, injury—all of it is stomach-churningly real. The book floods your senses, forcing you to feel what the characters—because this is a dizzyingly third-person-omniscient narrator—are feeling. In the beginning, you’re lulled into sun-kissed contentment (a classic technique: establish the calm happiness and then shatter it, but Alam does it with such skill he may as well have invented the skill). Then the fear and pain, the teeth falling out like water, the driving through fields, lost and increasingly more terrified, the feeling of going to bed with strangers in your home...all of them crowd the reader’s senses.
I’ve heard, many times, that anxiety backs up in your system and causes the gears to stick because your brain reacts to danger where there isn’t any. Alam has weaponized that tendency by writing a frightening book in which very little actually happens. Our protagonists rent an air bnb on Long Island. Midway through their festivities, two people claiming to the home’s owners appear saying that something has happened in New York City, some sort of blackout, and instead of going home, they came out to their summer place.
It’s an eerie premise, sure—akin to The Invitation and mother! both of which are excellent horror films. But where the films build to terrifying climaxes, Leave the World Behind gives us fewer answers. All the time, Alam is giving us information none of the characters are privy to—telling us who will later die in a government encampment, who else’s teeth are beginning to loosen, what the planes are doing overhead—but never why. Stephen King uses this terror-inducing omniscience, the little hints sprinkled in through the work, and as a Constant Reader I’m familiar with it, but it works on me every time.
There’s something to say about commentary on our dependence on technology, some analysis of apocalyptic literature in the 21st century, particularly post-2020, the kind of commentary that places the book in its context, because it sure as hell knows exactly when and where it’s set. But for me, the book is simply about constant, vague terror. It’s a few hundred pages of a violin bow’s scraping, and in the end, we get no satisfying come-down. The writer uses language to unsettle the reader. The writer is successful. There’s more to the book than that, of course, but that’s its core.
And after I closed it, I ended up in the throes of an anxiety attack. The credit doesn’t all go to the book, of course, there’s genetic factors, a global pandemic, and the general chaos of life that helped push me over the edge, but Leave the World Behind was a variable into today’s panic. I’m recommending it, from below the covers, in the cool, dark room where Ashley eased me into bed and got me calmed down. I give it the highest praise possible from a horror writer with anxiety: this book absolutely terrified me.
Eve Taft is a rogue multi-classed with bard. Find her at evetaft.wordpress.com, where links to her publications in Mad Scientist Journal, Quail Bell, Visitant, and many more can be found. Her horror column, "Quaint and Curious Volumes," is published monthly at Luna Station Quarterly.
