This Is the Way the World Ends
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Fans of One of Us Is Lying and The Hazel Wood are cordially invited to spend one fateful night surviving an elite private school’s epic masquerade ball in Jen Wilde’s debut thriller, This Is the Way the World Ends.
As an autistic scholarship student at the prestigious Webber Academy in New York City, Waverly is used to masking to fit in—in more ways than one. While her classmates are the children of the one percent, Waverly is getting by on tutoring gigs and the generosity of the school’s charming and enigmatic dean. So when her tutoring student and resident “it girl” asks Waverly to attend the school’s annual fundraising Masquerade disguised as her, Waverly jumps at the chance—especially once she finds out that Ash, the dean’s daughter and her secret ex-girlfriend, will be there.
The Masquerade is everything Waverly dreamed of, complete with extravagant gowns, wealthy parents writing checks, and flowing champagne. Most importantly, there’s Ash. All Waverly wants to do is shed her mask and be with her, but the evening takes a sinister turn when Waverly stumbles into a secret meeting between the dean and the school’s top donors—and witnesses a brutal murder. This gala is harboring far more malevolent plots than just opening parents’ pocketbooks. Before she can escape or contact the authorities, a mysterious global blackout puts the entire party on lockdown. Waverly’s fairy tale has turned into a nightmare, and she, Ash, and her friends must navigate through a dizzying maze of freight elevators, secret passageways, and back rooms if they’re going to survive the night.
And even if they manage to escape the Masquerade, with technology wiped out all over the planet, what kind of world will they find waiting for them beyond the doors?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An elegant masquerade ball turns survivalist nightmare when attendees find out the world is ending in this hair-raising dystopian chiller by Wilde (Queens of Geek). White Waverly, an "autistic, gay scholarship nerd from Queens," has strived to earn every financial opportunity while attending New York Webber Academy to alleviate her parents' monetary concerns. To help pay for her mother's multiple sclerosis medication, Waverly even spends her nights and weekends tutoring her trust-fund classmates—including popular tutee Caroline, who soon offers Waverly a chance to attend the school's $10,000-a-seat masquerade ball. Waverly accepts, hoping to confront her secret ex-girlfriend Ash, the dean's daughter who ghosted her. But the ball turns to chaos when the lights go out and the world outside the masquerade's windows looks like "a nuclear attack, the start of World War III, the end of the world." Though repetitive action sequences sometimes lower narrative immediacy, antagonists—in the form of the academy's school administrators and the parents of Waverly's wealthy classmates, all intent on surviving imminent apocalypse at any cost—prove compelling in this locked-room drama. Via Waverly's razor-sharp commentary and grandiose descriptions of the masquerade and its attendees' wealth, Wilde fashions a claustrophobic atmosphere that heightens the cultish horror happenings. Ages 12–up.
