Overview
That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperature was merciless: ninety-eight, ninety-nine, then a hundred in the shade. It was heat to die in, to go nuts or to spawn in. Old folks collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars, lovers couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up. In the parched suburbs, ice cream trucks plinked their baby tunes into streets that sweated tar. Down at the harbor, the sea reflected the sun in tiny, barbaric mirrors. Asphyxiated, you longed for rain. It didn’t come.–from The Rapture by Liz Jensen
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It’s a blazing hot summer in the not-too-distant future. Thirty-five-year-old psychologist Gabrielle Fox is painfully rebuilding her life after a terrible accident that has left her a paraplegic, and her lover dead. The effects of incapacitating memories and guilt have led to Gabrielle’s dismissal from her London job. Craving anonymity and a fresh start, she moves to the coastal town of Hadport and accepts the first post she is offered, as an art therapist at a lackluster institution for dangerously psychopathic teens.
Gabrielle’s predecessor is on emergency leave thanks to an unhealthy obsession with Bethany Krall, now Gabrielle’s patient. A punky and precocious wild child with matted hair and kohl-rimmed eyes, Bethany’s claim to fame is that she murdered her own mother with a screwdriver. Aside from a gift for rip-roaring verbal obscenities and a knack for intuiting the inner torments of strangers, Bethany has the uncanny ability to gleefully forecast the environmental catastrophes now befalling the earth at a terrifying rate. Though skeptical at first, Gabrielle finds herself preoccupied with Bethany, her alarm and fascination swelling with every accurate prediction.
Seeking a rational explanation, Gabrielle connects with the big-hearted Scottish geophysicist Frazer Melville, an expert on global weather patterns. Though Frazer is not able to give Gabrielle the easy answer she hopes for, she finds comfort in his presence, and perhaps even attraction. The two begin a tentative romance as Gabrielle realizes that the door to her sexual life may not be closed after all.
Meanwhile, the enormous human cost of each global cataclysm is tallied in advance by a jubilant Bethany, who likes to toss in a few snippets of scripture memorized at the knee of her father, the charismatic fundamentalist preacher Leonard Krall. Gabrielle suspects Krall of having more to do with his wife and child’s ruin than he admits to, but before she can fully investigate, she and Frazer must put their reputations on the line and find a way to warn humanity of the looming apocalypse.
Raved about in The Times as “an unputdownable eco-thriller” and already optioned for film by Warner Brothers, Liz Jensen’s The Rapture once again proves Jensen to be a master of page-turning suspense. Readers will be entertained by the pyrotechnics of this hugely intelligent and wholly original voice, while unnerved by the high-voltage ecological horror story that feels all too plausible in our time.
Synopsis
An electrifying story of science, faith, love, and self-destruction in a world on the brink.
It is a June unlike any other before, with temperatures soaring to asphyxiating heights. All across the world, freak weather patterns—and the life-shattering catastrophes they entail—have become the norm. The twenty-first century has entered a new phase.
But Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her life after a devastating car accident that has left her disconnected from the world, a prisoner of her own guilt and grief. Determined to make a fresh start, and shake off memories of her wrecked past, she leaves London for a temporary posting as an art therapist at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital, home to one hundred of the most dangerous children in the country. Among them: the teenage killer Bethany Krall.
Despite two years of therapy, Bethany is in no way rehabilitated and remains militantly nonchalant about the bloody, brutal death she inflicted on her mother. Raised in evangelistic hellfire, the teenager is violent, caustic, unruly, and cruelly intuitive. She is also insistent that her electroshock treatments enable her to foresee natural disasters—a claim which Gabrielle interprets as a symptom of doomsday delusion.
But as Gabrielle delves further into Bethany’s psyche, she begins to note alarming parallels between her patient’s paranoid disaster fantasies and actual incidents of geological and meteorological upheaval—coincidences her professionalism tells her to ignore but that her heart cannot. When a brilliant physicist enters the equation, the disruptive tension mounts—and the stakes multiply. Is the self-proclaimed Nostradamus of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator or a harbinger of global disaster on a scale never seen before? Where does science end and faith begin? And what can love mean in “interesting times”?
With gothic intensity, Liz Jensen conjures the increasingly unnerving relationship between the traumatized therapist and her fascinating, deeply calculating patient. As Bethany’s warnings continue to prove accurate beyond fluke and she begins to offer scientifically precise hints of a final, world-altering cataclysm, Gabrielle is confronted with a series of devastating choices in a world in which belief has become as precious - and as murderous—as life itself.
Publishers Weekly
Apocalyptic global climate change fuels Jensen's terrifying near-future tale about the human will to survive or, in the case of Bethany Krall, a psychic psychotic teen who stabbed her mother to death, the will to embrace death. Bethany, a patient at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital in Hadport, England, forms a strong bond with her wheelchair-bound psychologist, Gabrielle Fox. As Gabrielle treats her patient, the world outside the hospital suffers natural disasters foreseen by Bethany after ECT shock therapy. Meanwhile, Bethany has been traumatized by the “Faith Wave” views of her father, Rev. Leonard Krall, who believes the Rapture is approaching. Since Bethany is convinced she bears the mark of the beast, she fears she won't go to heaven. Gabrielle seeks help from Frazer Melville, a physicist who takes Bethany's catastrophe calendar seriously. In gorgeous prose, Jensen (Egg Dancing) paints a depressing but oddly hopeful portrait of a modern doomsday scenario. (Aug.)