Helen Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) and Sin Blaché, making their debut, have teamed up to offer readers a tightly paced, genre-bending tale in Prophet, which 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," inexplicably able to detect the truth around him with near infallibility, and Adam Rubenstein, an American sergeant "unremarkable to the point of invisibility," quietly dangerous and 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 and the dangers it presents to those who encounter it. ("It just feels as if none of [the words] are working properly. None of them are talking about what's there.") As Rao and Adam work to open their minds to the impossible reality of their situation, Macdonald and Blaché invite readers to do the same, starting with an expanded understanding of the concept of nostalgia, and the not-so-subtle tactics of the power-hungry intent on capitalizing on that: "[Nostalgia] is emotional and psychological, but it's also political. Highly manipulatable, either politically or in the marketplace."
While fantastical, this framing feels eerily similar to many 21st-century political conversations, making Prophet as much a work of science fiction as a prophetic what-if tale. Within this construct, 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. As the two seek a kind of peace--for themselves and for the world they know--amid the warring forces of hope for the future, love in the present, and a burning sense of nostalgia around them for the perceived safety of the past, Prophet proves a beautiful, tense, strange, and heartfelt first collaboration from a duo not to be missed. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer
Shelf Talker: A beautiful, tense, and heartfelt novel imagines the weaponization of nostalgia, as an unlikely pair must fight to protect themselves--and the world they know--from memories made deadly.