by K. Ancrum
First published 2018
August has always been the one who shows up for Jack. He is a misfit with a history of setting fires; Jack is the golden boy, varsity rugby star, the kind of person everyone watches. Their friendship runs deeper than any of that. Then Jack starts seeing things. A fantasy kingdom bleeds into the corners of his vision, vivid and elaborate, and it will not stop. Their parents are not going to help. So August does what he has always done: he handles it himself. He decides to treat Jack's hallucinations as real. He steps into the visions alongside Jack, follows him through a dark prophecy, and lets the two of them drift away from every other person in their lives. The further they go, the harder it becomes to find the line between loyalty and something much more dangerous. This is a story about two boys free-falling together, told in micro-fiction fragments and multimedia elements that mirror the fractured, urgent quality of what they are living through. At its center is a codependent relationship built from equal parts love, madness, and the question of whether saving someone can also destroy them.
Genres: literary-fiction, mental-illness, contemporary, young-adult, psychological-thriller, dark
Vibes: dark, emotionally-intense, fractured, intimate, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: codependent-relationship, descent-into-madness, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Period: contemporary
336 pages · Paperback · Square Fish
Content warnings: mental-illness, self-harm