Once upon a time in Sweden, in an alternate reality, there was a company called Swedish Machines. This company purchased the Black Fallow, a simple wrecking yard. In their version of 1980, after several years, Swedish Machines completed the build of a long-range weapon called the Tetrahedron. The utmost concern should have been executed around this monstrosity of a weapon. Alas, it was not, and it exploded, causing a nuclear fallout. The families living in the area had to be evacuated, the scientists and military remained but ended up experiencing neurological issues unexplained. Eventually, it was decided to just allow nature take back the land of The Black Fallow. Amongst all this destruction, heartache, and tragedy, two boys kindle a decades long friendship around this very land.

This was such a well-written sci-fi tale. I love how the author incorporated pictures into the book that connected them to the story. I’d read anything by Simon Stalenhag after this fantastic sci-fi adventure.

#ThxNetGalley #SunsetAtZeroPoint #SimonStalenhag

Thank you to NetGalley for my Advanced Reader's Copy of this book.

Another solid book from Stålenhag. I loved the artwork—it looks like real photography seamlessly blended with fantastical machines. His stories are as much about the people as they are about the world they inhabit. It's obvious why his books average over four stars on reading platforms, but in my opinion, this one didn’t quite reach the level of Tales from the Loop or The Electric State. That said, I still plan on buying it for my library.

so many of the pictures are of mundane things like cars in parking lots and beaches, nothing compared to Stalenhag's work in previous books. The story itself is also nothing particularly engaging or interesting.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4. If based on illustrations alone, this would be a perfect 5 stars! The mix of nature and technology in his artwork is such an interesting combination; it’s so realistic that it sometimes feels like I’m looking at a photograph, and for that reason it paired so well with the story. It made me get lost in it and really brought the characters and landscape to life.

The story was so intriguing, I couldn’t put it down! The cryptic feel was consuming and made me want to figure out what the heck was going on and exploring the Black Fallow alongside the characters. I loved Linus and Valter - the transparency of their mental health struggles, the queer representation and romance, and the ebb and flow of their friendship across several years. I could have done without a couple crude side characters, but I do appreciate that at least racist behavior was called out.

My main issue was the writing. First, it’s written in second person, which is definitely unique but also a little jarring; I started reading it initially assuming it was supposed to be read as a letter, but I don’t think that was actually the intention. Also, it seems as though it was translated into English, so the grammar was off at times. The sentences are a bit choppy and some of the dialogue was odd - such as the use of “haha” in several quotes. Not a big deal, but noticing it did pull me out of the moment.

Those issues aside, the story itself is interesting, nostalgic, and emotional. I think this book should be viewed as the art being the primary focus, with story as more of a bonus or companion, and it will be much more enjoyable. Overall, I had a great time reading this and would love to look into Simon’s other books.

Thank you so much to Saga Press, Simon Stalenhag, and NetGalley for this ARC!

I have been a huge fan of Stålenhag's artwork for a long time now so you can imagine I was elated to get the ARC for this one. Unfortunately, nothing I view it on allows me to zoom in to the text large enough for me to easily read most of the pages. So my review is mostly of the art itself rather than the story. What little bit I could read of the story was great. I do agree with others that this maybe isn't as good as Tales from the Loop but it is far from bad.

Stålenhag has a beautiful way of illustrating landscapes with a twist. Unfortunately in my opinion, this was missing more of the twists from his earlier works. I'll always have a soft spot for the beautiful dusty landscapes with a derelict robot in the distance or something to that effect. There's a little of that in this but if you're hoping for more of what you've come to know and expect, you may be missing out.

All in all, I love the art and would recommend it on that alone but I'm excited to get my hands on a physical copy to read the story.

I wish I could remember what exactly turned me onto the work of Simon Stålenhag, but when I did, I fell instantly and completely in love. I began with Tales from the Loop, the first in a loose trilogy, which is a lovely, grieving exploration of civic memory and imperfect nostalgia. The stories — more anecdotes really — are told in the vein of an oral history from the perspective of children who grew up around the titular Loop, a CERN-like installation on an island in Sweden. The text is interspersed with photorealistic painting of landscapes, often with something uncanny to skew the perspective: kids playing with a robot in a rye field, or a parking lot with an 80s Honda and a decaying industrial structure of some kind off in the distance. The technological marvels of the Loop are impossible for the reader to ignore, but to the kids in the stories, they’re just the backdrop of a childhood.

The stories are all ostensibly about the effects of the Loop’s occult science, but they include glancing details about the experience of childhood in ways that demonstrate the complexities of growing up. For example, there’s one story about a gadget that the speaker’s father brought home and what it did, but the anecdote opens with the father throwing his wedding ring into the yard due to a fight with his mother. It’s clear they eventually divorce. The emotional upheaval of living though one’s parents’ divorce ends up being submerged, a contrapuntal narrative that is just there, under the surface. Any story of one’s childhood carries this emotional substrate, a quantum foam of memory.

Tales from the Loop is shot through with nostalgia, but it’s not always a good nostalgia. This strange sense of bad nostalgia is the hook to Stålenhag’s work, for me. Nostalgia is often a perfecting emotion, stripping out the chaos and discomfort of one’s inchoate self and leaving a gauzy, indistinct sense of wonder. Stålenhag somehow somehow creates a reverie of childhood that captures both the awe and disquiet of growing up. And as the trilogy goes on, the disquiet deepens. By The Electric State, the sense of melancholy and grief is almost overwhelming, as our main character road trips across an apocalyptic America. (The less said about the execrable Netflix adaptation, the better.) Stålenhag’s books are beautiful and terrible, awesome and awful, in a quietly humane way.

Which brings me, somewhat long-windedly, to Sunset at Zero Point. Like Tales from the Loop or its darker sequel, Things from the Flood, the setting is a rural Swedish island community living in the strange gravity of cataclysmic scientific experimentation. Here, the test firing of a weapon prototype in the early 90s ended in almost Tunguska-level devastation. Something about the weapon rendered the affected landscape strange and often treacherous, and the area was sequestered into an exclusion zone. (Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X isn’t a bad analogy, though the vibes are different.) Also like Tales from the Loop trilogy, the perspective is from an adult looking back at their childhood.

But Sunset at Zero Point is considerably more intimate and personal. Both Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood have almost collective narrators, as befits an oral history, and there’s no single narrative arc. (Which is probably why Tales from the Loop worked so well when adapted to an anthology series. I found that adaptation quietly lovely; it almost reverently recreated Stålenhag’s aesthetic.) The Electric State tightens its perspective to a pair of siblings, but the canvas is enormous, as is the cataclysm going on in the background. Sunset at Zero Point tightens the focus to two boys growing up together into young adults, but the story almost never leaves their hometown. It’s intimate in other ways: Sunset at Zero Point is a profoundly affecting queer coming of age and love story. I just about jumped out of my skin at that conclusion.

The narrative voice in Sunset at Zero Point is the form of second person that nonetheless has an I narrator: the now adult Linus addressing his childhood friend Valter. The perspective shifts from their adolescence to the now, and it’s sometimes all jumbled up, the way memories of someone you’ve known forever sometimes fuse and shift. Was this the time we went to the cabin and saw the northern lights, or the time when the spring peepers sang all night and kept us up? This puts the reader right in the middle of their relationship in so many ways, draws you in. The painting are quieter than some of his earlier works too; The Electric State, especially. You recognize the boys in most of them, something that is also unusual for Stålenhag’s landscapes. Typically his people are dwarfed by their surroundings, turned away so they’re almost faceless.

Now, I read an ARC, so I’m going to have to check against the published text — and I will be getting a paper copy the second it’s out — but there are two points in the story when the text gets all jumbled up, when events appear to happen out of order. The first time I encountered it, I assumed it was a formatting gaffe. You see this sometimes in advance copies, and you assume it’ll be cleaned up before the book goes to press. But the second time I encountered it, there had been some key exposition about the strange physics of the exclusion zone. Without getting too far into it, Valter describes the exclusion zone as a “non-Euclidean landscape”, a place where time and space have been fractured and out of joint. Straight lines don’t go straight; distance squiggles.

Which is what is happening in the recounting of those two moments: emotion bends memory on non-linear paths. Both moments are emotionally intense, key pivots in the boys’ relationship. By disordering the recounting of those events, Stålenhag forces the reader to go back and close read those moments over and over to understand what happened. This is fucking brilliant. You’re already deep in the relationship between the boys, and now, like Linus, you’re scrying the viscera of their relationship to put things into some kind of order, to make it make sense. This is just a perfect invocation of that sense of of spiraling that sometimes happens after emotionally devastating moments. If I can just put this in the right order, it’ll be alright.

I finished reading and floated around the house in a pleasant sense of ecstatic despair. I’ve felt this hard to define emotion after some of my favorite novels: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke, or Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker. There’s something about stories of domestic upheaval foregrounded by intrusive technology that just utterly get to me. Sunset at Zero Point has everything that makes me freak out so hard about Stålenhag’s oeuvre: the lappingly memoirish sense of a place, of a community. But it’s so much more personal that his other works. I almost used the word smaller, but I think think that can have negative connotations. But it is smaller: the kind of intense relationship between two people that nevertheless encompasses the world.

I received a review copy from Netgalley and Saga Press. Sunset at Zero Point is out Dec 9, 2025.

What an interesting book! I have enjoyed other works by Simon Stålenhag including Tales from the Loop and The Electric State. His latest novel is set in a similar landscape, with an eerie post-apocalyptic collection of disused secret military vehicles and buildings, brought to life by many excellent illustrations. In addition there is a strong gay subplot which I liked.

I hope there will be a movie or TV version of this book!

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC.

"What's the point of money if you're dead inside"
My favorite quote and what is the point of anything if you are dead inside. Live and do what makes you happy or scared as long as you have no regrets after.

This is a story about a strange sci-fi zone where strange things happen. Following two young men over the span of many years. The story is a mysterious one and the characters are just living in this slightly altered reality with everyday problems. Leave the small town, get a job, get married, but still stuck on the 'what if' of things. LIttle things in a relationship and going back.

The cover art is amazing, there is more inside the book as well. I would recommend reading this in paperback or hardcover. I felt I lose a bit of the impact of the photos reading it on an e-reader. This does not impact the rating.

Sunset at Zero Point (Hardcover)
by Simon Stålenhag

this book is not my cup of tea.
Translating from another language, the book has some grammatical, and imagery errors.
the similarly to catcher in the rye, the yearly ventures of youth is passed me. the pictures go from realistic to misty and vague in the same page.

What a ride. I had seen and enjoyed his art before, which is what inspired me to read this when it crossed my path. I came for beautiful art with a related story, and the story held my attention.

I know there are people who don't like the second person, but here it is perfect. I've always felt that second person past is best for telling a story, with regrets, to a person who has been out of their life for a while. That is exactly what is going on here. I love it. Also, I loved the accuracy of the portrayal of young people who stayed vs. young people who left in a small town. I'm not from Sweden, I'm not even from Europe, but the people and places would have been real to me even without the pictures. And the pictures really are are fantastic on their own. As a group of images, even without the text, they call back to each other throughout the story, so that I believe that even on their own they tell a story, which good art does.That was such a good read. I need to go find his other books.

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.