So the kids are all chillin in Hell and having a grand old time and honestly I just wanted to write that sentence. Although also it’s true.

In the middle of the night, Ellie gets up to do some business, and she sees a bunch of planes flying low overhead, with lights off.

The noise faded quickly, till I could no longer hear it. But something remained. The air didn’t seem as clear, as pure. There was a new atmosphere. The sweetness had gone; the sweet, burning coldness had been replaced by a new humidity. I could smell the jet fuel. We’d thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans invaded everything, everywhere. They didn’t have to walk into a place to invade it. Even Hell wasn’t immune.

Nice line.

The next morning the kids compare stories about observing aircraft, and they realize not everyone woke up for every iteration and multiple flights went overhead throughout the night. Although that seems rather fishy to me; Ellie described the noise as being pretty extreme. Just how heavy sleepers are these kids?

They all brush off the incident as demonstration planes returning from the Commemoration Day festivities, then have a delightfully ironic conversation about ‘when would be the best day to invade Australia’ and ‘haha, what if there was a nuclear war and we didn’t even notice while in here.’

Then Ellie and Homer talk about how he’s got a crush on Fi, but he’s spent so long being a goof-off they worry if he says as much to her she won’t take him seriously.

Most of the writing so far in this book has been narration and summary, which does at least make it a quick read but doesn’t give me a lot to talk about. The kids aren’t doing much or interacting a lot, and the few things that are going on are very episodic and disconnected. There’s very few genuine character moments, mostly centering on Fi and Homer, and even those are bogged down with exposition basically explaining to us what we should have been able to get from the dialogue. I get what this section of the book is trying to do – establish the characters and set up Hell as the idyllic contrast to what’s about to come – but it’s not doing it very efficiently.

The kids spend five days in Hell, mostly doing nothing, in that nice relaxing kind of way. They don’t really get motivated to leave again until they run out of food. They make it back to the Hermit’s bridge they found on the way down and follow the trail up from the bridge instead of climbing back up the cliffs. The beginning of the track was hidden in a weird tree and very hard to see if you didn’t know it was there, hence why everyone thought that there was no way to get down into Hell.

The kids take their time going home, goofing off and making frequent stops on the way down. They see six random fires out on the plains once they get on the homeward side of the mountain, but shrug it off. On their last time-wasting stop, Ellie mentions how antsy she is to get home to Lee.

“I wish they’d get a move on. I’m really keen to get home.”

Lee looked at me and said, “Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m in a funny mood. A bad mood.”

“Yes, you seem a bit wound up.”

“Maybe it’s those fires. I can’t figure them out.”

“But you’ve been uptight most of this hike.”

“Have I? Yes, I suppose I have. I don’t know why.”

“It’s strange,” Lee said slowly, “but I feel the same way.”

1) You can’t just drop this in randomly; Lee has been pretty chill and Ellie only started getting antsy after they reached the truck. Things were too sparse and too summarized to really feel this during the camping trip, thus it seems tacked on now.

2) But WHY? I get why now, with the planes and the fires, it can tickle a person’s subconscious even after they rationalize it away. But the whole time? This would make more sense if the parents’ hesitance had been different before they left, but according to this book, everything was fine and normal and no one was worried about anything. Suddenly Ellie has her spidey-sense tingling? And Lee, too?

I think there’s a couple ways to fix this, the first being, again, to change the mood in the parents before they left. Conflicts can escalate suddenly, but they don’t come out of the blue, there would be unrest beforehand. The other way? Cut the opening altogether, start when they leave for the hike, and devote a lot more page time to character interactions. Show them progressively getting more uneasy after the plane incident, and cut the implication that they knew something was wrong the whole time.

AND THEN I TURN THE PAGE AND WHO THE FUCK CARES ABOUT THAT ADVICE because Ellie goes home and her dogs are dead?????? (Excuse my capslock, I’m not mad at the book, great scene, but OMG.) Only one dog, the oldest, is barely hanging on.

The rational thing to do would have been into leave her and rush to the house, because I knew that nothing so awful could have happened to the dogs unless something more awful had happened to my parents.

Now that’s some grade-A emotional whiplash and OMG THE POOR DOGS.

They get into the house and find everything tidy but abandoned and there’s no power, so all the food has spoiled and they can’t even feed the one barely-alive dog OMG THE POOR DOGS. There’s a great sense of foreboding and confusion and no wonder everyone forgets about the dull-ass disjointed first few chapters as soon as this one comes around. I mean, I stick to the whole ‘parents should have been more worried’ but from an emotional-tone-setting angle, this is great.

They wander around the house in a funk realizing all the problems and at a loss for what happened, except for Lee who seems to have suspicions. When Ellie suggests checking out Homer’s place next, he says no, let’s get a radio. See if there’s any news or broadcasts. Except they get a radio and don’t hear anything, so they head to Homer’s house.

As with the radio, so with the Land Rover. I revved it so hard and dropped the clutch so roughly that Kevin[…]hit his head and hurt it. The Landie kangaroo-hopped a few meters and stalled. I could hear Grandma’s voice saying ‘More haste, less speed.’

Man, this chapter is full of great little details about their burgeoning panic.

They get to Homer’s place, which is much the same, with the animals in distress after being abandoned. They take care of them as much as they can and debate trying to call someone on the radio, but ultimately decide against it.

The kids start putting together the facts and realize that whatever happened must have gone down at the local county-fair-type show, since the houses look like the parents left calmly and planned to come back soon. They spend a whole conversation talking about invasion without saying the word invasion, which I rather like, it’s in that scared ‘I don’t want to believe it’ way. But, despite some very emotional arguments trying to come up with alternative theories, yeah, only one fits, they’ve been invaded.