I finally got my hands on a copy of Bets by Carrot Quinn, the hiking/survival midapocalyptic novel.
if you look up "Carrot Quinn" you won't get a fiction writer, you'll get one of the most reputed travel writers on thru-hiking (the sport of hiking long-distance, as in thousands of kilometers, for months). here she wrote a book about a girl who has to leave a city and make it to a distant state, on foot, in a very plausible near-future where infrastructure is abandoned in the countryside. there's no zombies, no mad max warlords. there doesn't need to be, narratively speaking; there's plenty of tension to go around when one fall from your bicycle, one infected cut can kill you horribly in a world where telephones don't work and antibiotics are dwindingly rare to find.
Bets is a combination of two unnamed genres that interest me. One is what I think of as "expert fiction"; this is when someone is an total enthusiast of a certain field or hobby or special interest, and they write fiction that introduces us to their world. The survivalism in Bets is dense with detail that cannot be matched by writers who have never spent endless nights crossing mountains with no support but an ultra-light pack. The other subgenre is what I think of as "slow apocalypse"; post-apocalypic fiction where there never was a shit-hits-the-fan moment, no big nuclear war or civil war or plague or anything. Just—formal jobs get increasingly harder to get; the police gets increasingly repressive; supply chains still exist but are increasingly premium-priced; at some point most people are living squatting in abandoned buildings; older folk pine for the memory of coffee and chocolate while younger folk never tasted them, except in gated communities where they're tokens of privilege.
you know, basically the world we're leaving for our kids IRL.
Bets is self-published on Amazon, sadly, and has some marks of an amateur writer (some of the punctuation use is non-standard, etc.) This does not impinge on Quinn's skill as a narrator and storyteller; she's just missing an editor. Think of it as a DIY zine and the form of writing as an experienced hiker telling you stories in a tent and it works fine. I'm reading it during my many trips and enjoyed it quite a lot so far. there's something in the energy of this story that brings me strongly back to forest occupations like Lützerath, Hambi or Riederwald, and I kinda wish I could leave a copy in each occupation or squat still standing, along with companion "slow apocalypse" punk series Danielle Cain.
oh and the author wants you to know that the dog doesn't die. there's a lot of bad stuff happing in this book, but nothing to the dog. the dog will be fine.
