ISBN: 9781643973579
BHC Press, 2023
Generation Annihilation is a bitter, dark YA horror book that starts with a murder, specifically main character Shaun Treadway killing his step father. More complicated than that, the killing comes after his stepfather has put his mother in the hospital again, and launches Shaun into a journey into adulthood through hiding from the authorities sure to come for him.
Shaun flees to the small town his mother’s family comes from, which appears strangely abandoned save for a teen girl and her father who live at an maintain the grounds of an old abandoned asylum. Shaun’s life might be mired in violence and the worst side of humanity, but his moral compass and emotional intelligence are sharp. He immediately senses the offness of the place, but feels compelled to help the girl, Cassidy. In doing so he stumbles into a secret operation to save the world by eliminating every teenager with any ounce of rebellion, disobedience, or violence.
While in concept it seems heavy handed and unrealistic, in execution this book reflects aspects of teen/young adulthood that others miss. Shaun and Cassidy, and the other teens they encounter, are impulsive, lonely, struggling with trauma and mental illness, and endlessly punished and persecuted for it. Nothing they do is right, and the situation proves than their worst fears are true, nothing than can do would be right.
The adults are needlessly complicated, but I mean that not as a criticism of Meyer’s writing, but in that adults always are, with their own complications and reasonings that they seem to expect the teens to know, tip toe around and rise above without communicating at all.
As strange and unrealistic, maybe even impossible, as a secret government funded mind control scheme in a tiny town asylum seems the feeling is one of the world gone mad–at you, and being completely unwilling to give you the kindness, justice, and hope it promised your adulthood would bring. Shaun, and his fellow hooligans, are flawed, but not beyond redemption seeing as they are the only truly moral ones in the story. However the oppressive crush of the adults and government all being against you, and the knowledge that this position is one enforced on you by the people that were supposed to love and protect you, or that you love and are trying to protect sings powerfully to any reader who has spent time during their coming of age, also coming to terms with your parents being a cause of the trauma and despair in your life.
Generation Annihilation leaves loose strings, and uses over the top horror elements to nail a unique coming of age story that lots of books gloss past, or use as dark history for a character but don’t really seem to understand as Meyer does here. I greatly enjoyed reading it, and found the horror far more personal than the other books I’ve read in the last few years. Recommended.