Make Sure You Die Screaming: Zee Carlstrom

There is a particular kind of American fury that doesn't announce itself at the podium. It steals a BMW, throws a premixed margarita in the cupholder, and points itself toward the wreckage it came from. Zee Carlstrom's debut operates precisely in that register, raw, careening, and arriving at exactly the right cultural moment.

The premise announces its intentions with a middle finger raised to polite fiction. A newly unemployed, genderfluid, pansexual narrator learns their conspiracy-radicalized MAGA father has gone missing in deep-red Arkansas. Rather than process this through any recognizable therapeutic framework, they abscond with an abusive ex-boyfriend's car, collect Yivi, a "garbage goth" companion met barely two weeks prior in an Airbnb basement, and hurl themselves down the American highway at speed. Carlstrom's timing is sharp: this is a novel perfectly calibrated to the increasingly strange frequency of contemporary American life.

The queer lens here is structural. The narrator's identity isn't subplot or credential but the architecture through which the writing processes estrangement, radicalization, and so much grief; at the loss of a friend and of watching a parent become a stranger wearing a familiar face. The novel's DNA echoes: Burroughs in the fractured momentum and feverish language; Thompson in the pharmaceutical velocity and satirical rage; and something of Frazier's Cold Mountain in its damaged soul moving through a politically riven South, seeking something that may no longer exist.

Carlstrom braids anger and glee, hope and despair, grief and loss with genuine skill, and beneath sits something darker, a despair that gives the novel its real gravity. Readers would do well to stay alert: this is a narrator who insists, perhaps too emphatically, on their own truthfulness, and that insistence is itself a kind of tell.

Yivi is handled with tough tenderness, naïve in the way of someone not yet fully broken, her bravado a thin membrane over real vulnerability. The novel doesn't resolve its tensions so much as accelerate through them, which is either honest or incomplete depending on your appetite for moral ambiguity. Some stretches achieve such velocity that consequences slide off the surface, and the cosy and the catastrophic sit in occasionally uneasy proximity.

Make Sure You Die Screaming ultimately earns its fury. A queer novel about estrangement and grief that refuses sentimentality without abandoning love. A road novel about America that refuses optimism without abandoning forward motion. Carlstrom has written something mean and strange and necessary about the cost of surviving a family, a country, yourself, and still finding community on the other side of the wreckage.

Out now £10.99

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