Termush (Faber Editions): 'A classic―stunning, dangerous, darkly beautiful' (Jeff VanderMeer)

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R.F. Kuang, Sue Lynn Tan, Rebecca Ross, Kate Heartfield, N.E. Davenport, Saara El-Arifi, Juno Dawson and Sunyi Dean We did not envisage quite such a ruthless change in our environment. But one of the reasons for our feelings of weakness may be that things have retained their outward appearance, now that the disaster has happened. Without knowing it, we put our faith in the disaster; we thought our panic would be justified if we had to use symbols as violent as those our imagination needed earlier.

While the management seeks to censor bleak news, the narrator tries to find out the truth along with a few others. As things escalate, all the residents will have to make big decisions. Chilling and prescient.' Andrew Hunter Murray 'Elemental and true.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave 'Mesmerizing.' Sandra Newman 'Like someone from the future screaming to us.' Salena Godden I absolutely fell in love with the more political and moral elements of this story, and found it really highlights the journey of self-discovery once everything you thought you knew about yourself is stripped away from you.I have been installed in one of the rooms on the top floor here in the hotel. Everything went according to plan, just as it had been run through for us beforehand, on the lines explained in the brochures we received with our enrolment forms. Welcome to Termush. Termush is a luxury coastal resort like no other. Find out more about what we have to offer, from gourmet dining to our in-house reconnaissance team. We gaze at the dark mass, where buildings, streets, trees, hordes of people, wide stretches of country with farms and herds of cattle are set solid like flies in amber… water streams out of the taps and the cars are piled up in the streets and nothing of this can be changed; the world has spun full circle, and the survivors must exist without it. The patrol would of course be equipped with the necessary protective clothing, but the attempt to make it motorized had been abandoned. According to the last radio reports we received in the shelters the entire highway network has been destroyed. There was talk of using small scooters, but these are really better suited to shorter distances and the problem of fuel would be difficult to solve.

I think that is what makes Holm’s Termush so fantastic. Yes, he has a major point of social commentary—how the wealthy isolate themselves away from the problem of the world–but its told in an organic and well-constructed way. I include myself in these observations, because I go about preoccupied with the coppery-green colour of the carpet, which annoys me, and the noise from the room next door which impinges on me against my will. The armchair is the only item of furniture in the room which gives me satisfaction. Even the mirror has a frame which makes it clash with the rest of the furnishings. A series of brief chapters, recounted dreams and events, relate the process of interior transformation experienced by N as the normalcy becomes more and more a charade. Holm introduces his central metaphor via Termush’s advertising brochure: “A physical aspect of the radioactive destruction is the transformation of elements” (9). What will change look like away from the signs of devastation? The narrator, a former teacher, is doubtful of the integrity of those in power - questioning transparency, ethics, and the morality of the organisation. The furniture in my room was stored for safety in the cellar, even the mirror, the bookshelves and the prints on the wall. Everything was brought up and the room was arranged before I moved in.At first, things proceed as normally as could be expected after a nuclear war. The guests are comfortable, there's plenty of food, though there are alarms when excessive radiation levels are monitored and the guests have to go down to the shelters.

No, I mean after all we have experienced in the last few days. Or rather all that we have been spared from experiencing, but which we know has happened." I absolutely loved this short, fast paced read by Sven Holm (translated from Danish by Sylvia Clayton) Indeed, our new introducer Jeff VanderMeer praises Termush as ‘a classic: stunning, dangerous, darkly beautiful'. His foreword brilliantly places the novel in its literary context, arguing that the way in which Holm prioritises the ‘psychology of the holed-up survivors and the hazards of societal breakdown’ in the ‘wrong future’ bridges the genres of 1950s ‘disaster cosies’ by John Wyndham and the extravagant 1970s dystopias of J. G. Ballard. We were called down to the lounge early in the morning. The message came over the hotel’s loudspeaker system, which evidently works so that it can broadcast this type of command even when the individual loudspeakers are switched off. When I use the word “command” I am not trying to suggest any feeling of opposition on my part, but I do find that this arrangement discriminates against the individual guest. And yet I have my doubts about this; the system may be essential for us all, it is merely the use of it in this instance that I object to. In some countries there have been successive apocalyptic upheavals within a single human lifetime. In 20th-century Russia and China, revolutions and wars consumed immemorial communities of peasants and nomads, along with urban workers and intellectuals. A bourgeois civilisation that had developed over centuries fell apart in interwar Europe, opening the way to conflicts of extermination and the Holocaust. Long periods of gradual change have been rare, and abrupt discontinuities the historical norm. In other places – the Congo, Lebanon, Haiti – collapse has become a way of life. The same end may be in store for American cities that have become body-strewn war zones as a result of the opioid epidemic and uncontrolled crime.The faith persists that Western societies can avoid the anarchy advancing across much of the planet. Progressive rationalism, neoliberalism and eco-utopianism are branches of fantastic fiction, which serve to distract us from the daily corrosion. In contrast, Termush is a testament to realism, a travel guide to the world in which we are learning to live. Termush caters to every need of its wealthy patrons—first among them, a coveted spot at this exclusive seaside getaway, a resort designed for the end of the world. None of us had expected that it would happen so painlessly. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. We had unconsciously thought in terms of something more drastic, a radical transformation, with every single object showing traces of what had occurred, the furniture and the walls changing character and the view outside our window revealing a totally different world.