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The numbers used to live on screens. Now, they have teeth.
Inside a deteriorating house in a ruined Saskatoon, the walls are closing in long before the horizon changes.
Troy, a broken former finance executive, spends his days obsessively calculating water rations and clinging to the ghost of his lost status.
His wife, Jenny, once a highly curated trophy wife, has been forced into a fierce, unblinking pragmatism, managing the house with a cold clarity while trying not to drown in the bitter, silent warfare of their dying marriage.
Down the hall, their teenage son, Liam, frantically logs empty radio frequencies to drown out their arguments, while eleven-year-old Clara retreats to the garden, feeding worms to a heavy, lead-veined insect she treats like a pet and calls Pewter.
Then, on a Tuesday morning at exactly 11:14 AM, the howling prairie gales cut out entirely.
In the suffocating stillness, a kilometres-wide wall of absolute darkness surges over the northern bluffs. It is a compounding, multi-million-bodied horde of mutated, semi-metallic locusts, insects with lead veining the chitin, making them nearly indestructible, and driven by a single, rolling collective mind that shaves the landscape to the bone. It was nicknamed The Front.
As the windows shatter inward and the heavy carapaces begin to chew through the drywall, the family’s domestic fronts completely shatter.
To survive the night, they must get through a visceral, zero-sum war of pure survival in the city of Saskatoon.
Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.