This Is the Way the World Ends

An elegant masquerade ball turns survivalist nightmare when attendees find out the world is ending in this hair-raising dystopian chiller by Wilde (Queens of Geek). White Waverly, an “autistic, gay scholarship nerd from Queens,” has strived to earn every financial opportunity while attending New York Webber Academy to alleviate her parents’ monetary concerns. To help pay for her mother’s multiple sclerosis medication, Waverly even spends her nights and weekends tutoring her trust-fund classmates—including popular tutee Caroline, who soon offers Waverly a chance to attend the school’s $10,000-a-seat masquerade ball. Waverly accepts, hoping to confront her secret ex-girlfriend Ash, the dean’s daughter who ghosted her. But the ball turns to chaos when the lights go out and the world outside the masquerade’s windows looks like “a nuclear attack, the start of World War III, the end of the world.” Though repetitive action sequences sometimes lower narrative immediacy, antagonists—in the form of the academy’s school administrators and the parents of Waverly’s wealthy classmates, all intent on surviving imminent apocalypse at any cost—prove compelling in this locked-room drama. Via Waverly’s razor-sharp commentary and grandiose descriptions of the masquerade and its attendees’ wealth, Wilde fashions a claustrophobic atmosphere that heightens the cultish horror happenings. Ages 12–up. (May)