Total Oblivion, More or Less
Alan DeNiro
Spectra, 2009
U.S. trade paper, first edition
320 pages; $15.00

Total Oblivion, More or Less, is just about the strangest fantasy I’ve ever read – and I’ve been reading fantasy and weird fiction for more than 45 years.

Imagine waking up one day to find that Scythian horsemen have invaded your hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. Their sworn enemy, the Empire, has set up shop further down the Mississippi River. They’re in a constant state of war, and you’re in the middle of it. There’s a plague sweeping through the country; the buboes that victims get have pictures in them. Wasps are somehow involved with the plague, but it’s not clear whether they’re attracted to plague victims or spreaders of the plague; one thing that is clear is that a victim more or less turns to the papery consistency of a wasp’s nest if stung.

Safe to say that you wouldn’t have the faintest idea what the heck is going on:

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started turning wrong. Bad things were happening in the world, like glaciers melting and terrorists blowing up rail stations, but even though these were areas of concern, we weren’t freaking out on a minute-to-minute basis because of them. We thought we were safe for a long time. Everything was normal….

While school was finishing up, we began to hear reports, on the edges of our hearing, about a plague and the armed men following in its wake. Up north, and in the Dakotas. We expected someone to tell us what to do about it. No one did.

And so it begins. An announcement comes across the radio that the post office is closing for inventory. Then the internet stops working, and no one answers at the office of the internet provider. Cell phones gradually stop working. Planes no longer fly over. And then, one day, the history teacher starts speaking in a language that no one understands, harsh and guttural; even she is confused by it.

Change continues to unfold at a tremendous rate. Soon money is useless and food is hard to come by. Macy, the narrator, is sixteen years old when the book opens, and it’s starting to look like the plans she had for her life aren’t going to work out. Soon she and her family – an older sister, Sophia, a younger, rather wild brother, Ciaran, and her parents, Grace and Carson, are aboard the Prairie Chicken, traveling down river to St. Louis, where Carson is expecting to be able to take up a new position as a professor of astronomy at a local university. This doesn’t seem like an entirely realistic plan, but what else are they going to do?

The weirdnesses in the book steadily multiply. One of the oddest things that have changed the most seem nonetheless to have always been in their new configuratons. Nueva Roma, for instance, is made up of stone skyscrapers that are ancient; the New Orleans it seems to have replaced might as well never have been.

The book covers roughly a year of changes, one in which Macy seems to come into her own self, to know how she feels about her family and to have an idea of how she’s going to make it in this new world. DeNiro keeps a tight focus on Macy’s personal story, despite interludes between chapters that sometimes fill in blanks, and sometimes further define non-viewpoint characters. That means we never learn how this change came to be, whether the changes have stopped and this new world is permanent, or where the Scythians and the Empire came from. It’s all a mystery to us as much as it is to Macy, and that seems to be pretty much the point.

As compelling a read as Total Oblivion is, it is not totally successful. DeNiro occasionally pours on the weird just for the sake of puzzling his readers ever further. Not everything meshes as well as it should. People seem to adjust with astonishing ease to the change of everything in their lives, and to find new livelihoods despite it all. And if a reader fails to suspend disbelief for so much as an instant, imagining what would really happen if technology simply failed and people were thrown into a wholly new world like this, without supermarkets, medical insurance and communications systems, everything falls apart. Where is the death and suffering? By no means are they completely absent from this book, but neither are they as present as they ought to be in a post-apocalyptic world.

Perhaps that simply isn’t DeNiro’s project here. He just wants to tell a story about a world where everything and everyone changes, and what life along the Mississippi would be like as a result. And that he does, and does well. Just keep reading to find out what happens to Macy and her family and don’t think about the apocalypse or its likely consequences, and you’ll have a great time.