Helen Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) and Sin Blaché have teamed up for Prophet, a tightly paced, genre-bending tale that imagines the weaponization of nostalgia--and the surreal, horrific threat that poses to the modern world.
A diner has appeared in the middle of a British field. Except it's not a real diner--it's more like the memory of one, with the scent of coffee but no coffee makers, a bright neon sign not powered by electricity. Other objects, too, have popped into existence without explanation: a Scrabble box that's solid all the way through (with no interior), a rotting bouquet of roses, a teddy bear, a cassette tape. Despite the seeming innocence of the objects themselves, they turn out to be gravely dangerous to those from whose memories they have sprouted--turning nostalgia into a harmful weapon, one requiring careful investigation and containment. The U.S. military brings in two pros to peel back the layers of this "bizarro nightmare": Sunil Rao, "a savant with an attitude problem," and Adam Rubenstein, an American sergeant assigned to keep danger-seeking Rao alive as they hunt down the ever-morphing substance known as Prophet.
Prophet is slow to build at first, and a bit confusing at times--a result not of poor writing or worldbuilding, but of the sheer absurd horror of a world shaped by Prophet. Nonetheless, Macdonald and Blaché have created not just unlikely heroes, but an unexpected queer romance, complete with absolutely pitch-perfect banter between Adam and Rao across every page. Prophet proves a beautiful, tense, strange, and heartfelt first collaboration from a duo not to be missed. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer