Trigger Warning: Rape, Death, Sexual Assault
Last week I read Into The Mist by P.C. Cast, and couldn’t put my finger on what felt off. The premise is incredibly interesting - a group of female teachers during the apocalypse, where a green mist covers the US killing men and giving women strange powers - but the stakes never felt high, and I was struggling to connect with the characters.
The issue, I realized about halfway through the story, was that the characters didn’t struggle. There are obstacles, sure, a broken bridge here and an angry drunk there, but every single problem these women face, the solution is discovered or offered either in the same chapter the problem is introduced, or the next chapter over. A little girl falls in a river and begins to be swept away where no one can reach, and suddenly a man comes out of the woods and saves her. If the characters get shot, no worries, starting right now one of the ladies is able to heal people. The mist starts getting too close and a strong wind blows it away. The entire book is would-be problem after would-be problem, none of which lead anywhere.
The powers these women gain after coming in contact with the mist were a big part of the issue, because why would the characters struggle, if they each conveniently gain abilities that combat every issue they could be having? The youngest member of our party, Gemma, can heal people. Mercury, our leading lady, has super strength and speed. Right at the end of the book one of the other teachers, Imani, suddenly gains the ability to prophesy? This seems almost entirely so she can refer to “The Destroyer” in the last chapter, which was not a thing so much as hinted at AT ALL throughout the entire book, and was clearly a power Imani was given just to tease the sequel. Most infuriating of all the gifts is Stella’s, the gift of insane intuition that completely destroys any sense of tension, because she tells you at the beginning of the scene if you should be scared or not. She says when things are safe, when there’s danger, where they need to go. She can even gather to a certain extent if someone is lying, or if their intentions are bad. Her ability works in a way that they are able to avoid almost any danger, or at least be well prepared when it finds them, and eradicates any sense of apprehension a reader might potentially feel.
More than that, the characters don’t struggle emotionally. So imagine you’re on a work trip and watch a bomb get dropped on Oregon. Imagine immediately after that, your close friend / mentee brutally dies in child birth and two of your coworkers disintegrate into a pile of messy goo, you realize that your spouse / parents / siblings / children are probably dead, and you have to try and find a way off the mountain you’re stuck on while still covered in your friends blood. Would you be having a wine sleepover with all your girlfriends that night? I think not! There is a singular scene where the women - three of them, mind you, which is about half the party - cry for the families they've lost, but they cry for maybe ten minutes, and it happens in between chapters, in a place we can’t see. After the aforementioned wine sleepover, where they all dressed in matching flannel pajamas, Gemma’s mother abandons her. It’s a silent admission that she’s always cared for her husband more than her daughter as she leaves without bothering to say goodbye, and Gemma, a sixteen-year-old, is said to be teary-eyed maybe twice. It does not affect her story any more after that.
It is nearly impossible to genuinely connect with a character if you are never allowed to see them struggle. You can’t sympathize with them or care about their sorrows when the characters themselves don’t seem to care about them. Stories require hesitation, stutters, moments of reiteration and repetition. An author, to a certain extent, has to tell you why you should care for these characters. There are tons of ways to do this, but even if it's not the main approach they take, about 97% of authors include the angle of "because they're in danger". You care about the character because they're in a stressful, emotional scenario, and you sympathize. If you don't include this angle, and the emotional / physical stress of a situation is ignored or written out, a book becomes little more than a bullet point list of where they went and why, an ongoing “and then they did this and then they did this and then they did this and then…” It offers no consideration or collaboration from the reader, and that makes a book dull.
And then of course, we have a list of uncomfortabilities. Ford, for example, the only Hispanic character, throws Spanish words into English sentences. Stella has some questionable relationships with significantly younger men (more concerning because this woman is a high school teacher, which is just icky), and then we have Karen Gay. Karen Gay, who is said to be incredibly religious and homophobic. Hilarious.
Here’s the thing; there was such a lovely opportunity here to write a well thought-out redemption arc where Karen sees the error in her ways and grows from it, but that just… Didn’t happen. To start, although we’re told Karen is homophobic and hateful, we never actually see her be either of those things. She critiques one of the characters for cursing - who then promptly threatens to ditch her on the side of the road to die - and is mildly uncomfortable with Mercury and her pagan beliefs, but other than that, nothing. What we do see is Mercury saying that Karen is thirty pounds too heavy, and the rest of the women routinely pressuring Karen to drink, smoke, try drugs, and stop being so reserved. The few times the book actually discusses Karen’s intolerance for other belief systems, Mercury says “get it together or we’ll leave you in the woods”, and then Karen says she’ll get it together, and we move on. So I guess it’s not just about things being reiterated, as I mentioned earlier, it’s about things being reiterated and bringing something new each time, either about a character or about her relationship to another person. Why is it being reiterated? Why is she having trouble shaking this habit, and what does that say about her?
We don’t get that with Karen, arguably the most sidelined character, and arguably the most interesting. She, at least, has the chance to struggle, even if it’s struggling with being tolerant towards other denominations. But that’s struggle! Which we do not see. But it could be there! But it’s not.
Moving on to book two, Out Of The Dawn, where the journey continues. In Book 2, Mercury grieves the loss of a man she’s known for three days after he dies. And I’m not going to say anything about her grieving him, it’s a high-stress scenario and she really liked him and he died really fucking horribly, so that makes sense. What I am going to say is that Mercury 1) grieving for this man more than we see Imani grieve for her dead husband and two dead children and 2) being told to get back to work after three days of grieving, with those three days of grief joking referred to as her “depression sleep” from then on, is insane. For such a dark, serious concept, it is almost never treated as dark or serious, and it completely kills your investment in the characters and their story.
I will admit that I did not finish Out Of The Dawn, because about 150 pages in our youngest member, Gemma, is brutally raped in the woods, and it has zero impact on the rest of the story. She stumbles back into camp, describes the encounter intimately and in incredible detail to the entire group (including a man she's known for only a few days, not including maybe one time she met him a year or so prior), and after the man is dealt with, this horrible trauma has little to no impact on the story or Gemma as a character. I flipped through the chapters, I jumped back and forth, I read reviews, and they all gave me the same answer; Gemma’s rape was half-assed shock value, and not much more.
There is a place in literature for stories of assault and rape. Of course there is. It’s incredibly important to bring attention to it, and it can be a healing and cathartic process for an author to write about it, if they’ve had experiences in their own life. And not every person who experiences a terrible assault reacts the same; of course, there is a reality where Gemma does not react loudly and openly, but in quieter, more subtle ways. But it is a life-altering experience, and if it is written in a book, it cannot under any circumstances be taken lightly. It requires care, research, and an incredible amount of thought, and it requires a certain level of weight and severity while handling that this author simply didn’t give it. It’s upsetting to read it used like it is in Out of the Dawn, as a tool in some grand attempt at fear-mongering.
P.C. Cast makes dozens of jabs at men, the danger they pose and their inadequate leadership, across both books. Which I’m not against, on paper. But it reaches a point where it’s performative, actively works against the rest of the story, and in cases such as Gemma’s, completely demolishes any belief I had in the book and the author. I do not believe that this author has a genuine grasp on feminism, if she thought this was okay. As someone who has not once shied away from content, I found myself genuinely uncomfortable with her articulation of the content, and that’s what made me put the book down.
All this is to say, I was severely disappointed with this series. As someone who was raised taking part in Pagan rituals and LOVES apocalyptic settings, there was so much potential for a really beautiful story of women growing as individuals and learning to lean on one another, building their own society which was entirely separate from the capitalistic and patriarchal one we currently reside within. Unfortunately, P.C. Cast completely missed the mark.
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