3.5 stars

Blake Crouch is an absolute master of the mindfuck. His concepts and plotting are brilliant. His apocalyptic scenarios are nightmare-inducing. However, as with Recursion, I found this book to suffer in its actual level of artistic craft. None of the characters really came off the page for me. The plot is phenomenal, but I wish these books had a little more poetry to them when it came to the actual prose and the depth of the characters. The engagement factor is there, but it's the absence of a certain artistic depth that stops his books from breaking my all-time favorites list. The scenarios just don't resonate on an emotional level for me in a way that lingers, that makes them into something more profound than just a "cool story."