Trigger Warning: Those uncomfortable with body horror, mass murder, and child endangerment should steer clear.
OGRE explodes into action with the destruction of the UN-like Be’shon building. On a nearby planet called Eeteron, fourteen-year-old twins Sean and Mylee are forced to confront the idea that their “genius scientist” parents are responsible for the resulting apocalypse. Unimaginable horrors introduce the twins to the new hellscape, and, as time passes, human society becomes unrecognizable.
Author Shanna Terese excels with her young protagonists, whose voices, problems, and worldviews shine as the beating heart of the story. The siblings’ banter inspires engaging dialogue, especially as comic relief during tense moments. Below is one such example:
“Aunt Linda and Aereal got into a giant fight at breakfast!”
“It wasn’t a giant fight. It was a normal Aereal fight.”
“Like I said, giant.”
The novel explores a question often left unanswered in YA adventure novels: where are the adults? Sean expresses extreme relief when he, Mylee, and their cousin Aereal run into Mr. Hannen, a neighbor. Sean’s disillusionment returns when he realizes that the adult doesn’t know any more than he does. In fact, Mr. Hannen knows less. It is his adulthood that ultimately dooms him: in his single-minded rush to find his children, he ignores the teenagers’ warnings.
Terese skillfully pushes this idea to its conclusion—that adults can be ignorant, selfish, or downright evil—as Sean and Mylee learn the truth about April and William, their “supervillain” parents, and assimilate into Eeteron’s post-apocalyptic society. It is a nuanced and tender depiction of the adolescent realization that adults are human, too. While the narrative is mostly spent in Sean’s tight third-person perspective, shared moments of terror result in a dual POV with Mylee: “the truth sank down into their bones, that they could not stay in the air forever… that they might be dead too, dead already, and only suspended in life, like the last rays of the dying sun.” This creative use of language powerfully depicts the twins’ dependence on each other as well: “the distance felt like a cord, straining… He lost sight of [Mylee], and the cord snapped.”
OGRE is perfectly suited for self-publishing. A traditional publisher likely would have tightened the exposition, or diluted the graphic violence for its young audience—and these changes would have destroyed what is so special about this story. OGRE makes up its own rules and thrives within them, daring to set up the trilogy’s conflict after almost 30% of its first novel. Sean and Mylee spend the first third of OGRE struggling through an apocalypse and encountering monsters that no one should ever face alone. Rather than detracting from the main conflict, the time spent fleeing the former world adds gravity and loss, as the reader experiences its destruction alongside the terrified twins. This exposition, which would be excessive in a vacuum, is therefore time well spent.
Shanna Terese’s OGRE is a propulsive, coming-of-age genre mashup of sci-fi, horror, and thriller with terrifying non-human antagonists in a futuristic world.
~Leah Block for IndieReader