This book is incredible in so many ways. A rare gem that will make your heart pound like a thriller and make your hair stand on end from the prose. Also rare in the fact that it's written in present tense, yet flows effortlessly. Though I'm a fan of the present tense it has a number of limitations, one of which being that it feels unfamiliar, since most people are used to reading in the past tense. But I hardly noticed it wasn't in past tense. I got about fifty pages in before I realized. That's how perfect and necessary it is.

And actually, this book made me rethink the way I write in first person. Hig's narration is fractured, often in incomplete sentences. And of course it is. That's how people really talk, even to themselves. Especially to themselves, especially in a world as lonely as this. And the way he left certain things unsaid. Genius, really. Said out loud they're cliches; unsaid, they're landmines, his emotional revelations. Really it's what the narrator doesn't say that's important. The blank spaces we, the readers, fill in with our own universal experience. Utterly brilliant.