'When a summer storm sweeps through a sleepy town unleashing a monstrous and otherworldy power that threatens to break reality, Olivia will stop at nothing to find her best friend and get them to safety.
'Three years after running away from home, Olivia is stuck with a dead-end job in nowhere town Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. At least she has her best friend, Sunflower. Olivia figures she’ll die in Chapel Hill, if not from boredom, then the summer night storm which crashes into town with a mind-bending monster in tow.
'If Olivia’s going to escape Chapel Hill and someday reconcile with her parents, she’ll need to dodge residents enslaved by the storm’s otherworldly powers and find Sunflower. But as the night strains friendships and reality itself, Olivia suspects the storm, and its monster, may have its eyes on Sunflower and everything she loves. Including Olivia.'
A Light Most Hateful tells the story of Olivia, a teenage runaway who left home three years ago when she came out to her father and it didn't go well. Having settled in the small town of Chapel Hill, she found a new life for herself, along with her best friend Sunflower. All is good for Olivia, except for one thing, she is harbouring a secret crush on her best friend.
Whilst working the concession stand at the local drive-in cinema one evening, knowing that Sunflower is off up at the local teen parking spot with her latest boyfriend, her night goes from bad to worse. First a mysterious figure called Christmas arrives on the scene, acting all enigmatic and odd, then one of the local boys tries hitting on her for the dozenth time, and a gang of youths start harassing a homeless woman. Enraged by the teen boys glee at harming a poor woman down on her luck, Olivia steps in. But when the woman turns into a horrible monster who quite literally eats one of the gang alive, all hell breaks loose.
As Olivia tries to flee the drive-in a strange storm rolls across the town, and begins to affect people in strange ways. Most of the townspeople have been left as mindless zombies, wandering the streets and standing around doing nothing. Whilst seemingly peaceful, disturbing those affected by the storm turns them into horrific killers who attack and murder anyone they can. With the homeless woman chasing her, a horde of infected townspeople ahead of her, and more strange events happening as the storm continues on, Olivia sets out to find Sunflower. If it is indeed the end of the world, who better to spend it with than the girl she loves.
A Light Most Hateful is a book that runs at maximum speed. The book is barely more than twenty pages in, having only just introduced the readers to Olivia, Sunflower, and their complex relationship, when a homeless woman transforms into some kind of horrible lizard-like monster and swallows someone. It happens so quickly, and so unexpectedly that at first I assumed it was some kind of fake-out, that Olivia was imagining something shocking and impossible that would then be revealed to be fake. But no, just two chapters in and chaos breaks loose and never really stops.
If you like a book that doesn't spend a whole lot of time establishing things, that jumps into the action and makes the reader have to keep up then this is the kind of book that will entertain. It's something of a roller coaster ride, though one with a very short climb before the cart drops off the edge and throws you around wildly. Because things happen so quickly a lot of the background and important information to help flesh out the town and the cast of characters happens during the quiet moments. As Olivia runs from street to street in the overrun town, trying to find Sunflower, her mind casts back to their time together, and we learn about their relationship that way.
This structure means that you're never quite sure if the next page will be taking you down memory lane, giving you more context for things, or if you're going to be coming across some kind of cosmic horror there in the present. This does mean that the narrative feels a little manic, a little disjointed at times, and you find yourself having to wade through important memories that Olivia is thinking about when your logical side is yelling that it's really not the time to be worrying about such things. But this feels like it fits Olivia as a character, someone who is slightly manic, being dragged from one extreme to the other and just trying to keep her head above water.
A Light Most Hateful isn't a long read, at around two hundred and fifty pages it's shorter than the average novel, and the pace it travels at helps it to feel even shorter too. It's the kind of book that you can pick up and suddenly realise you've gone and read half of without realising because it grabs you and just doesn't let go.
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