Book Review : Kristopher Triana - They All Died Screaming (2020)
There isn’t a better nor a worst time to write a plague novel than 2021. People are more receptive to horrors of a hypothetical pandemic than ever, but it has to a) be really good and b) be “out there” enough to distract its audience’s attention from you know… the actual pandemic we got going on. It can’t get any more different from COVID-19 than Kristopher Triana’s They All Died Screaming. It can’t get any more apocalyptic either. Almost to a fault?
It’s both really good and really difficult to like at the same time.
They All Died Screaming tells the story of your friendly neighborhood drunk Chuck, a brokenhearted woman in her forties named Leslie, a conspiracy theorist named Eugene, a nameless barman and a few other lonely, downtrodden people facing a plague of screaming people. No one gets a fever. No one becomes a zombie. People just start screaming until they either die from exhaustion or simply kill themselves because they’re out of options.
What the apocalypse feels like
I aggressively wanted to like this novel for a variety of reasons that are both good and bad.
I thought the premise was smart and different (good)
I really liked the title (bad)
The cover looks like the cover of an Anaal Nathrakh record (bad, but you gotta admit it’s true)
I bought it as part of Triana’s fundraiser to pay for his dog’s chemotherapy (objectively bad/emotionally good)
Of course, I was setting myself up for disappointment. But there are parts of They All Died Screaming that I really liked. Whatever I might think of his aesthetic choices, Kristopher Triana can seriously write and his vision of apocalypse has this almost Hieronymous Bosch-like quality to it. The composition of his scenes is very vivid and original. The idea of someone starting to scream the head off their shoulders at any time has a very spectacular quality too.
They All Died Screaming is a novel about how the people our society have already abandoned will be the last people on Earth. It’s a cool idea and Triana explores it in a rather sincere, convincing way mostly through the character of Leslie, who feels like she’s the least deserving to have been cast aside. Although she doesn’t offer practical value to our band of survivors, she’s the one praising the value of keeping each other alive. She hasn’t forsaken her humanity.
Well… at least not entirely. Abandoning humanity before it abandons you is a problem in this novel. It’s hard to care for someone who doesn’t seem to give a shit for 200 pages.
What I don’t want my apocalypse to be
The main issue I had with They All Died Screaming is that I had to fight its characters every 5 pages or so in order to get something worth caring for. Part of it is me not “getting” extreme horror. I know this is a thing extreme horror authors do, having people wallow in their own vices and embodying fucked up ideas. I was not offended or anything like that. But I was grossed out a lot of times. It is worse than being offended because it makes you close the book.
I don’t know about you guys, but if my drinking buddy started bragging about how he shoved an Arby’s sandwich inside a woman during sex, I would not freak out or call him a misogynist. I would down my beer, get up and say: “please, never talk to me again” before walking out of that person’s life forever. I have a weak stomach for weird sex stuff. I don’t find it funny or interesting because anyone can potentially do it. It’s just weird and gross.
There’s also the subplot about pigs and kid abduction. I thought it would tie into the apocalypse narrative differently and I don’t really get what it brought outside of making one of the main characters more gross and less sympathetic than he should’ve been. Not that he was overly sympathetic to begin with, but sometimes a character is in dark enough circumstances. You don’t need to paint him in a darker light than he already is.
What a character doesn’t have in sympathetic appeal, they need to compensate for with relatable or intriguing appeal. Otherwise, it’s hard to stay interested.
*
While I can’t give They All Died Screaming a high score, it was a couple aesthetic choices away from being a 7.5 or so. I wanted to discuss it on the site because I thought it confronted me to my own relationship to art and helped me better define it. This is not for everyone. If you’ve read this review and still feel compelled to read They All Died Screaming, you probably should. Otherwise, you might want to pick up Kristopher Triana’s The Ruin Season instead.
What you should do is to donate to Triana’s dog fundraiser, whether it’s through purchasing a book or not. Sometimes, literature isn’t all there is. This score is a personal appreciation based on my own aesthetic preference. They All Died Screaming is creatively and narratively solid, it’s just full of extreme stuff that got between the characters and I. It might not affect your enjoyment at all, but if you’re still reading this you’re already aware of that.
