Review: The Survivor Wants to Die at the End

The Survivor Wants to Die at the End by Adam Silvera
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Silvera was starting to lose me a bit with his increasingly sprawling Infinity Cycle and its focus on too many obnoxious and unlikable characters in its ensemble, but with this return to the world of Death-Cast, he starts to un-lose me, because this book is where he starts getting right again, much of what he messed up in his other series. While this book is a great big brick of a book, just over 700 pages like Infinity Kings, it's a more streamlined story for sure, focusing a lot more on its two queer, neurodivergent protagonists as is traditional for this series. In this case, we get Paz (aka Pazito, though that nickname gives me the giggles every time because of its rhyme with the name of Silvera's real-life dog Tazzito) and Alano, both of whom were introduced as boys in The First to Die at the End.

I've seen a few reviews complain that this book gives a very unfair and unwelcome depiction of borderline personality disorder with Paz, but given that Silvera himself has that same disorder, I'm not surprised he depicts it in a very unflinching way (and of course he's good enough to include trigger warnings at the start of the book.) Meanwhile, Alano is very high on my list of favorite Silvera characters ever simply because he brings in representation for a very rare form of neurodivergence, one that I've only ever seen in maybe one other fictional depiction anywhere (which also happens to involve a character from NYC, although this book is more focused on LA since that's where Paz lives now.)

Being in an alternate timeline from ours, this book takes place in a 2020 that didn't see extensive COVID lockdowns quite as long as the real world, although the lockdowns and the disease did happen in universe. Not having Trump illegally and immorally occupying the White House in this world certainly helped nip the pandemic in the bud a lot better, but the politics of this world are just about as fraught as ours all the same. Especially because in the upcoming election, there's a heavily Republican-coded candidate who spreads lies about Death-Cast and even about Alano and his family, because while the Republicans in the real world run on racism and sexism and homophobia and against reproductive freedom, here they run as "pro-naturalists" who consider Death-Cast inherently evil. And Silvera does a great job of writing how some people from marginalized communities might still fall for right-wing bullshit, as unfortunately still does happen with some Latin people, some gay people, etc. etc.

There's a lot going on in this book, enough that even in 700 pages it's not enough to wrap everything up without a devastating cliffhanger. And that cliffhanger, which promises to finally answer some of this world's most burning questions in the next (and presumably final) book...well, if Gideon the Ninth had an achillean counterpart, Silvera's writing it as we speak. And that's all I'm going to say on that.

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