I’m not sure if I liked Leave the World Behind or not, but it is a novel that I will spend the next few days ruminating over. It has also made me realize that I am not at all prepared for a disaster.

Warning: you may find this review spoilery.

I will give it to you straight: this novel is not about providing an explanation for the events that are taking place and it does not offer much in the way of closure. Instead, Leave the World Behind is a psychological novel about how the characters react in a situation that is beyond their knowledge and control.

The premise is simple enough: a white family from Brooklyn, dad, mom and two teenage kids, go to an Airbnb in Long Island that they’ve rented out for a weeklong summer vacation. The Airbnb is isolated from the neighbouring homes and there is no cell service, but the family is having a good time swimming in the pool, soaking in the hot tub, splurging on groceries they don’t typically have the budget for, until one night there is a knock on the door: It’s the Airbnb’s owners, an older African American couple, G.H. and Ruth Washington, who have driven from New York to their remote Long Island home because the power has gone out in the city while they were on their way home from a night out and they felt uneasy about going back to their New York home.

Clay and Amanda, the white couple, are uneasy themselves that G.H. and Ruth just decided to show up at the Airbnb and ruin their vacation. Yes, there is some racial tension in this novel, but why would G.H. and Ruth go out of their way to drive to their Long Island home just because the power has gone out?

Well, it turns out that shit seems to have hit the fan: even though they still have power on Long Island, the TV has gone out, the Internet has gone out and the landline isn’t working. They are completely cut off from the world with no way of finding out what is going on. At one point, Clay decides to drive to the closest town to find other people and get information, but he ends up getting lost and sees no other cars and no other people, except for a Spanish woman that doesn’t speak English (since he can’t use Google translate on his phone, he ends up just driving away from her).

There are other eerie events that occur in the novel, such as the herd of thousands of deer that one of the characters spots on the move in the woods (animals have a better survival instinct than people), no ambient noise from birds or planes, etc., and sonic booms that are strong enough to crack windows and break lightbulbs. But worst of all is what happens with the teeth. My worst nightmare *shudder*

This novel does an excellent job of building up suspense and this sense of dread that the world as we know it is over, which is bolstered by the little nuggets of information of what’s going on in other parts of the world that the writer drops in here and there for the reader’s benefit. But really the focus of this novel is on the characters internal monologuing. We get a real sense of who these people are as we learn what they each think about the situation they are in and what they think of each other.

I do enjoy novels that are more focused on the characters than the plot. I like getting in other people’s heads and learning from other people’s perspective. I think that Leave the World Behind captures very well the different reactions people might have in a disaster situation; however, I would have appreciated not being left in the dark like the characters of the novel. But that is the point of this novel: we don’t know when the world may come to an end; it’s just going to happen.