Publishers Weekly
12/20/2021
Moore (The Not Wives) offers an evocative if undercooked story of New York City at the onset of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Orpheus, a 47-year-old poet who’s lived in the city since her early 20s, buys a bike before they sell out across the city, maxing out her credit card to do so. Her idea is to go somewhere, anywhere besides staying indoors. She bides the time of the pandemic cultivating social pods with her friends Gina, Lana, and Beemer, all the while hoping vestiges of the city as she knew it will survive. Orpheus’s loneliness is made palpable and expertly portrayed in short chapters that feel like diary entries; she resolves to “put the world in the book,” and Moore doesn’t miss a step, chronicling Orpheus’s involvement in Black Lives Matter protests and the All Cops Are Bastards movement. The short chapters can waver, especially when Moore drifts between recent events and unflagged flashbacks to Orpheus’s childhood. Some of the accounts of 2020 feel unprocessed and lacking in perspective, but Moore shines when channeling readers’ collective fears for the future. It’s a little slight, but it works as a pandemic time capsule. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"At once timely and timeless."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A wonderfully inventive novel about love, illness, and the devastating loneliness of isolation."
—Booklist
"Evocative. . . . Moore shines when channeling readers’ collective fears for the future."
—Publishers Weekly
“Carley Moore’s voice is a necessary joy in our current exacting times. With each of her works, her skills get sharper and her heart cracks wider—Panpocalypse is a masterpiece of fierce queer honesty, taking on the intricacies of our bodies and our minds, the city and the state, with fearless passion and bold, political intelligence. We need this book right now, and we’ll need it in all the nows to come.”
—Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
"Panpocalypse is a rousing, eerily enchanting, and verve-filled exploration of love and life in the midst of brittle collapse and upheaval. Moore's sharp and provocative voice adds much-needed complexity to the public discourse about the impact of COVID-19 on queer and disabled communities."
—Jamia Wilson, author of Young Gifted and Black
“Here’s the sexy, sad, queer, disabled, time-bending romp through the bleak pandemic landscape that you’ve been waiting for! No one lays herself as bare on the page as Carley Moore, and Panpocalypse is her most naked work to date. Whoever you are, and wherever you need your bike to take you, this book will speak to the universal need for love, touch, and acceptance in the hardest of times.”
—Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik
“Panpocalypse is the pandemic novel we all need—honest, raw, sexy, sad, joyful, and so, so smart. I couldn’t put this book down. The prose crackles, the story line shimmers; it has the energy of a queer, disabled Elena Ferrante living in modern-day New York City. There’s gritty reality, and there’s also the most fun escapist fantasy (and time travel!). Panpocalypse is a must-read for anyone who has yearned for connection in quarantined times.”
—Amy Shearn, author of Unseen City
“Carley Moore’s stunning novel captures the haunted dreams of our present world and the dire imaginings of an uncertain future. With the main character’s bicycle rides through an anxious and lonely city, Moore tells a story of queer longing that moves between past and present, imagination and memory, all the while taking pleasure and grief and hope by the hand and bringing them along as a mooring against social decay. This is a powerful story, naked and mournful, but also sharp and sensual and playful. It’s a book that will linger with you for weeks and months and years.”
—James Polchin, author of Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
Kirkus Reviews
2021-12-15
At the intersection of disability, queerness, and the pandemic, one woman’s meditation on loneliness and connection.
Originally serialized in the early months of the pandemic, this work of autofiction is narrated by Orpheus (sometimes called Carley and, briefly, Charlie), a queer disabled professor in her 40s. Orpheus is grappling with twin emotions: a loneliness forced on her by ex-lovers who don’t want to see her and a loneliness forced on her by a pandemic that won’t let her see the ones who do. As she rides through the mostly deserted city on her newly acquired bicycle, she hopes to see friends and her ex-girlfriend Eurydice. What she witnesses is sickness, police brutality, and brief moments of connection between and with strangers. Desperate to touch and be touched, when she gets an invitation through the dating app Lex to an underground club styled after the 1930s Parisian lesbian club Le Monocle, she jumps at the chance to go. Moore has a fascination with time; her nonlinear narrative is peppered with Orpheus' childhood memories of abusive doctors and portals into other worlds and time periods. While Moore does not shy away from the heaviness of her subject matter, the gravity is nonetheless offset by her persistent gentle humor and her optimistic bent: “If nothing else, we have all had to slow down. Some of us had to stop altogether. Sick time is anti-capitalist, revolutionary if you can accept it or even see it. Care and community in the time of the police state are radical acts. Still, to this day.” And while the pandemic permeates every moment of the novel, Orpheus' desperate search for autonomy, relationships, and self-actualization feels perennial.
At once timely and timeless.
