After the at-times claustrophobic, gnawing thalassian horror of Our Wives Under the Sea, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this shift into speculative fiction. While some themes are similar — the lasting, complicated relationship so many of us have with grief, the ceaseless push-pull of inertia and the sea itself, the mundane and yet character-defining nature of queerness — the avenues used to explore them are quite different.

Set in a world that is mid-apocalypse and mirrors our own in many ways, Private Rites is at its core the story of three estranged sisters navigating the sudden death of their father and what that means for their own relationships.

The backdrop is that slowly dawning apocalypse — a world that is drowning under a near constant deluge of rain and filled with people who cannot agree how to cope with it or what the next step is.

The pacing is very slow until about 85% of the way in, wherein I couldn’t make myself put the book back down until I was finished.