Hello, I have no witty title. Just go read The Outrage.

So, I recently had to clear a good chunk of books off my shelf because, as it turns out, I’ve managed to fill two entire shelves… Oops. But then, because I have no self-control, and found a gift card for a certain major UK book retailer, I ended up getting five new ones that I didn’t have room for, and The Outrage by William Hussey was one of those five.

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I will mention now, the first page of this book is a content warning about how the whole thing is set in an alternate UK where there was a far-right government takeover, and consequently includes mentions of homophobia, homophobic language, mention of ethnic cleansing, self-harm, mention of suicide and scenes of violence. I figure, since the book mentions that so early, I should as well, and if those sound like things you don’t want to read, perhaps give this book a miss.

But, to now continue as normal, the good bestie, the blurb, says that there are rules for everything, including what to say, think, and who to hate and love. Then that Gabriel is a natural born rule breaker: His biggest crime? Being gay, and that his secret must be kept, not only to keep himself safe, but his boyfriend too – whose father is the chief inspector at Degenerate Investigations. So, we’ve got plenty set up for conflict there immediately. The rules about being anti-gay, and the fact that the main character is in a relationship with the son of this world’s police force basically.

So this book just kicks right off into it. Queer people are referred to as “degenerates” in this world, and there’s this girl in Gabriel’s school who is fined because her hair is too short, because its length is in the area that suggests “degeneracy”, like, this world is so extreme that women aren’t allowed to have short hair. And there’s this group that basically does an annual sweep of the school to “scare the shit out of the kids”, but while this is happening, Gabriel has a banned disc – a movie – in his bag, so a bunch of the other kids in class distract the officers so he can drop it down a vent. There are so many things just like this in this version of England where people are so violently policed – later in the book, it gets revealed that the group that is in power abolished elections too. So, unless there’s a revolution, there’s no getting them out of power either.

But seeing the state of the country was one of the most interesting things in this book. To put it nicely, it’s in a shit state. From the description I got, it was very war-torn. There was a bunch of places that were just completely decimated, and since the country shut out “opposing voices”, loads of people are on rations, a bunch of people are just working in factories, and there are parts of the country that have just been abandoned and left to rot. It’s also mentioned that the country barely has healthcare and that men barely live past 50. And these things keep going. The Protectorate (which is essentially what England calls itself) shuts phone lines off at night, and since they shut out opposing voices, people don’t have mobile phones, have no internet, and barely even drive cars.

To touch on the whole outside voices thing again, the government has pretty much banned books and movies that they deem as bad. So, our main character, Gabriel, he and his boyfriend, Eric, have started this group called “The Rebels”, and their base in an abandoned library in one of the abandoned parts of their town. When they meet, their version of rebelling is getting together and watching illegal movies together – which we find out are things even like Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Love, Simon. Things that inspire people basically: Queer movies, movies about rebelling and movies about simply standing up for yourself.

I feel like Gabriel is our typical rebel protagonist. Even if he’s not overwhelmingly physically fit, he’s got the smart mouth that rebels usually do, and he’s always talking back against the officials. And throughout the story, we are given flashbacks of how Gabriel and Eric got together. That story is basically that Eric moves to their school, friendless, and Gabriel ends up befriending him and they both discover that the other is a little fruity. Then, as they continue, Gabriel is very open about his opposition to how the world is run. Eric is obviously apprehensive, because his father is the head of the police force, but he breaks down those beliefs and they more align with Gabriel’s in the end – as they get to the present day. We also learn the origins of the nicknames that they have for each other, which was nice. I’ll say, having characters have specific nicknames for each other is always nice, but Gabriel’s and Eric’s were Monkey and Scarecrow respectively, so I did appreciate that we got the origins for them, because otherwise it would be one of those gigs where they’d just be calling each other weird names for no reason.

We also learn more about Eric’s father in these flashbacks. Now, since he’s basically the chief of police, he’s this massive looming antagonist over everyone, and therefore, the villain. But like I said, we learn about him, and why he is the way he is, which I really appreciated. I feel like villains, sometimes, are just these immoral holes that have no humanity given to them, so there’s no redeeming quality to them, but Eric’s father did have some redeemability (that's not a word, but I don't care). So when the final confrontation happened, the ending felt a little more bittersweet than it would have had he not been given what he had.

Now, I realise I haven’t really talked about the plot all that much, and that’s partly because I don’t really want to spoil anything, since this book did only come out this year, literally like two months ago, I think. But it’s a rebellion book, so, you can gauge vaguely what happens throughout.

But let me say… this book was wild. I very much enjoyed it and having just read Metro 2033 that was rife with unnecessary detail that made the action get lost. The Outrage was almost the opposite of that. There was detail where it was needed, just enough so that I knew where I was and could make out an image of locations, but that image was something I could make up for myself. And because there was “just enough”, it meant that the action of the book didn’t get lost in the mire of exposition like Metro 2033 did. Also, there was a lot of action, particularly towards the end of the book. I’m going to make a very odd analogy here, so bear with me. You know in certain video games how there is sometimes a section where you ride essentially a water slide that ends up breaking out into a large, open pool. That’s what this book felt like. I felt like I was riding the slide down, and the ending felt like being let out into the pool. I was out, but in this open space where there’s room for just about anything.

I know that was a weird way to end this, but I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend giving it a read – so long as those content warnings I mentioned in the beginning of this post wouldn’t put you off.

Okay, bye!