I've always wanted to read a Stalenhag book but they're so hard to track down in libraries, so I appreciate this opportunity to read this! I love the set up of illustrations + story, and I loved the queer romance in it. I'm not sure this would be something I would recommend to most people though, maybe just folks interested in art.

I did get a little burnt out with the illustrations, they often ended up being the same building/machine again and again. The story was more interesting than the illustrations, surprisingly.

This particular book by was a little different from his other books, which specialized in strange and off-putting science fiction images of worlds sitting next door to ours, but like the others, it's still deeply nostalgic and emotional. I was expecting another remembrance of childhood exploits with tragic robotica, and while that is present to some degree, this story is, at heart, a gentle queer romance, and I found that a pleasant surprise.

If you enjoyed Stalenhag's other works, you may be a little surprised by this yourself. There isn't as much emphasis on the science, (although the characters lives revolve around a dark and mysterious technological event), this story is a little more character driven, with the paintings largely consisting of soft landscapes. As usual for Stalenhag, they're the kind of places the reader can imagine walking into and getting lost, but the story keeps the reader grounded, and feels less tragic than his other books.

The scenes are gorgeously rendered. I don't know that its at the same level as Tales from the Loop/Things from the Flood, but a solid entry into his own personal apocalypse.

Two boys mess around in a fallout zone and eventually fall in love. Even though the setting felt very unsettling and creepy, the two characters friendship developing into something more grounded the story. The formatting of the book was interesting.

I very rarely am left speechless and I went into this book not really knowing what to expect aside from that it sounded interesting, the title was engaging, and I kept hearing about this author. Sunset at Zero Point is an exceptional, literal piece of art and the illustrations help steer the story beyond the words providing a poetic immerses experience. .

4.5 stars

Did you enjoy reading the brothers Strugatski's novel Another Road Side Picnic or Lem's Solaris? Did you find M. John Harrison's novel, Nova Swing to be compelling reading? A final question. Do you get a pulse of frisson from stories that deal with the suspension of physics, as we know it, in uncanny non-Euclidean zones of ontological uncertainty? If so, this may just be the novel for you. Providing you are comfortable with tasteful and honest coming-of-age explorations of friendship and sexuality.

Five years after The Labyrinth, after stopping and starting different iterations of what would eventually become this book, Simon Stålenhag has returned with potentially his most complex book yet, Sunset at Zero Point. (A brilliant title that reveals its meaning gradually over the course of the book.)

The story opens in 2025, when the main character, Linus, is looking through old boxes after a divorce. In one box, he finds a key and a list of dates that only he and one other person know the meaning of. One of the listed dates is only three days away. He gets in a car and starts driving, and then the story jumps back to 1999.

Stålenhag employs a similar tone to the flashback portions of his biggest breakout success The Electric State, except here it's pretty much the whole book rather than short portions. The book takes place in Torsvik, a fictional Swedish town that abuts a wasteland called the Black Fallow Exclusion zone. The Black Fallow is a former weapons test site that, after a test gone wrong, is now fenced off and inhospitable. By 1999, Linus has moved away from Torsvik, while his childhood friend Valter still lives there.

The story recounts moments from 1999 to 2007 when Linus visits Valter in Torsvik. Valter, motivated by a pivotal moment in his past, is obsessed with the Black Fallow, and throughout the story he brings a skeptical Linus on excursions into the exclusion zone, where space and time aren't what they should be: You can walk in a straight line and end up going in a circle, you can walk through one valley and end up at one you've already gone through. Parallel universes seem to collide in one place, planting "shadow memories" in the characters' minds of lives they haven't lived.

Through all of this, they are also both grappling with their sexuality and what their relationship with one another really is, and they both deal with mental health difficulties and general feelings of alienation within their respective communities of Torsvik and Stockholm.

Like much of Stålenhag's work, it all feels nostalgic and bittersweet, and the implicit framing device of recollection that his debut Tales from the Loop had is made explicit here, with the main character looking back on his life while driving to an unknown location. The book deals with some rather heavy themes, but I wouldn't say it's nearly as dark as his last couple works. Compared to the coldness of The Labyrinth, this is downright optimistic, though I wouldn't want to hint at where the journey all goes.

The Electric State and The Labyrinth had very distinct visual styles, but I'd say this one doesn't really break any new ground. Fittingly, the art seems very Tales from the Loop adjacent -- all that golden hour nostalgia -- though it does also have some gloomier imagery that seems akin to his more recent books.

But I think the storytelling here is very distinct among his work, as it wears its emotions and themes on its sleeve a lot more than his other books. The science fiction aspects are as strange and cryptic as ever, but they feel relatively light compared to the focus of the story. It's much like a Tales from the Loop vignette expanded into a full book with a narrative style closer to his more recent work. Fria Ligan, the Swedish publisher, describes it as the author's "most personal" work, and the US blurb from Saga Press describes it as his "most intimate." I wouldn't want to ascribe anything in the story to his personal life, but both descriptions feel accurate to me. There's a level of specificity here that goes beyond his previous books, which he's able to achieve by keeping the focus very tight and exploring both the mundane and fantastical aspects of the characters' lives. And, while the framing device could be superficially compared to that of The Electric State, the difference is that there's no motivation here to be cryptic or withholding about the details of the past being described.

There are some aspects of the prose/dialogue that ignited some minor pet peeves of mine (spelling out "haha," using multiple punctuation marks like "!!" or "!?", this is probably just me), but I'm more forgiving of those in this form than I might've been in a full length novel, and, considering this is a translation, I'm also not sure what the conventions are in Swedish lit.

It's a beautiful book, and it's been great to see Stålenhag come into his own as a storyteller and really find his groove when it comes to narrative.