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Jenny Ebert is not even remotely comfortable in her own skin.

That much is apparent from the get-go in The Lonely Hearts Cinema Club, the latest book from David M. Barnett (Calling Major Tom) in which the film nerd who won’t accept she’s a film nerd – she loves film noir, and can talk at length about it but rejects being tagged as a nerd with a vehemence reserved solely for the existentially ill-at-ease – gussies herself up in Lauren Bacall-esque retro clothes and a coiffed do to die for and sets out for her imagined new life at university in Morecambe,  north Lancashire, as far away from her boring life and boring parents as she can get.

Barely nineteen and with attitude to burn, she arrives at Sunset Promenade, a rest home for the elderly, which is the only place she can find a place to live until the uni finishes building their seriously-delayed new residential accommodation, determined to tough out the intervening few months until her new glorious life as a tertiary bon vivant can begin.

The way Jenny, who is actually at heart a decent, caring, loving person who’s so alienated from herself she doesn’t know it yet, imagines it she will be the belle of the uni ball, accosted by people without number wanting to talk with her, laugh and socialise with her, the star of the show in a way she never was back home where social misery seemed to her only companion.

“Which of these will be her new friends, she wonders? She looks around the gathered tribes, the goths and the emos, the loners and the geeks. Mentally she puts a cross by each of them, looking around for people like her. People she is now. The cool people, the night people, the ones for whom style and class are effortless.” (PP 1-2)

Of course what we imagine will happen and what does actually take place are two utterly different things in most instances, since reality is not all the beholden to daydreams, even fervently-conjured up ones, and so Jenny, caught in a steady downpour that leaves her Bacall-esque persona nothing but a soggy memory, arrives to her new life wet-through, unsure of herself and totally unready for the new life that awaits her.

A life that will turn out to be rather lovely thank you very much, but which at first is confronting is its complete lack of semblance to what she envisaged.

She’s aware, of course, that where she’s chosen to live is full of old people, well five of them anyway; what she isn’t prepared for is that racist Mr Robinson, faded party boy Ibiza Joe, nasty Mrs Slaithwaite, mysterious but beautiful Edna Grey and daffy Mrs Cantle, and the Grange brothers who run the place, and Florin who tends to the lot of them, will become the community, the friends she’s been longing for, despite not knowing it.

And that in the midst of this seismic shift in expectations, driven by a wholly-unexpected reality, she will find the possibility of love with the loveable Ringo – yes he is a Beatles fan, particularly the song “Eleanor Rigby”, a young man still reeling from the relatively recent death of his mum and dad – rapprochement with her mum and dad, and more than a modicum of peace with herself.

It’s a journey full of endearingly quirky characters, high stakes and more than a little mystery, replete with a slew of well-used stock-standard British storytelling tropes that invest The Lonely Hearts Cinema Club with a Cinderella-like sense that change is possible, but more importantly, that what you think you want is not always what you need at all.

It is, as are most journeys, a rather convoluted one.

Gratifyingly for a book that doesn’t delve as deeply as it might into the human condition, The Lonely Hearts Cinema Club, takes its time reaching its destination, revelling in the way human beings don’t always change with the profundity, depth or certainty that they do in fairytales or morality plays.

In fact, where you might expect Jenny to have some sort of epiphany or the various residents of the home, their innermost secrets, or some of them at least, revealed to Ringo as part of his uni project on peoples’ cinematic memories rather playfully titled Ringo’s Stars, to turned into better, more well-sculpted versions of themselves, they zig where they might otherwise have zagged.

In a book which ends up pretty much where you expect it to with a delightfully happy ending where everyone gets a second chance, the path to this ending is pleasingly murky and not straight forward with people, even trope-heavy as they are, allowed to act like people.

In other words, get it wrong, monumentally wrong at times, Jenny most particularly who is damn well near unlikeable at first, and yet somehow stumble somewhere, good, uplifting and redemptive after all.

“Has there even been a Jenny Ebert before now? Or just a chaotic mass of static, a confusion, a random scattering of stories? It feels like Jenny Ebert has only existed properly since she came to Sunset Promenade; seems as though it’s now only her experiences and stories are stacking up properly, making a real pattern.
She only started feeling like Jenny Ebert since she stopped trying to decide what Jenny Ebert should be.” (P. 181)

It adds meat to the bones of what is at heart a slight narrative but a wonderfully conjured-up and good for the spirit one at that.

Barnett has a pleasing way of telling tales that seem lighthearted and fey on the surface but which delve down, past the cliches, the Britishness of it all and the slightness of tone and style, to somewhere deep and meaningful.

In this case, to the idea, and it’s a profoundly important one in an age riven by disconnect and polarisation, that community, a sense of family can grow in the most unlikeliest of people and between the most unlikely of people.

The residents of Sunset Promenade, a grand old house that is home to people with nowhere else to go run by brothers Barry (the garrulous, earnestly sincere one) and Barry (the hardheaded realist with a hidden heart of gold) contains a very unlikely assortment of idiosyncratic people, who are separated by age true but also by experience of life, or an obvious lack of it.

Somehow, through a series of events, none of which are all that consequential in and of themselves but fun to read about anyway, they come to appreciate how connectedness is something not to be feared or foregone but embraced, and embraced against your isolationist better instincts because there’s no tell the wonderful places it may lead.

You could damn The Lonely Hearts Cinema Club as light and insubstantial, and in some stylistic ways it is, but it is also emotionally-resonant and true, a testament to the power of togetherness, belonging and friendship, or is that family, and its power to transform in ways previously unimaginable and wholly, happily, transformative.

When the cover of a book proclaims it’s Romeo & Juliet meets Mad Max meets X-Men with a little bit of Blade Runner cheering from the headlines” it’s either got a healthy sense of what makes it work so well or its hopelessly derivative and is hoping that bringing up all its influences at the get-go will distract you from the messy mishmash to come.

Thankfully, Lifel1k3 by Jay Kristoff, is very much the former, undeniably influenced by the various plays and movies that it draws from but very much it’s own rabidly steampunky apocalyptic creation that swaggers and sways across the literary landscape with some gut punchingly good stops to smell the emotionally-resonant flowers along the way.

This my friends is how you write a superbly gripping futuristic techno-thriller with all the dystopian rusted bells-and-whistles in a postmodern, info-rich world where it’s damn near impossible not to be exposed to a myriad of other peoples’ already thought-out and expressed ideas.

Trying to be original in the midst of this been-there-done-there narrative glut is a challenge of epic proportions that has defeated many an author seeking to rise above the tumult and make a genre their own, but Jay Kristoff manages it with impressively gritty aplomb, and luxuriously rich and extrovertly-resonant writing, serving up an utterly-engrossing story that slams you in the face every bit as much as it tugs at your heartstrings.

“My mother send teams across the Glass, bringing back all they can find in the old world’s ruins and collecting them in Babel’s great library. Most of them already exist in our computer archives, but there’s nothing quite the same as sitting with a real book in your hands. Breathing in the ink and feeling all those wonderful lives beneath your fingertips. In between the pages, I’m an emperor. An adventurer. A warrior and a wanderer. In between the pages I’m not myself –and more myself than in any other place on earth.’ (PP. 123-124)

The story of Eve, a grubby 17-year-old robotics genius with a fauxhawk who lives in the Dregs, a down-at-heel lawless community on the now-island of Kalifornya, which itself sits across Zona Bay from the nuclear-glassed deserts that are all that remain of Arizona and New Mexico.

Her life is one of hardscrabble and loss, a constant quest to find the meds she needs to keep her cancer-stricken grandfather Silas alive, a stripped-back, the basics and nothing but the basics existence leavened and enriched by her can-do attitude, the undying friendship of her bestest Lemon Fresh (she was abandoned in a box of laundry detergent as a baby) and the protection of a small robot known as Logika called Cricket who has a snappy way with witty, put-you-in-your-place comebacks.

In the dog-eat-dog world that has eventuated from War 4.0 – yes, even conflict has gone digital in a future that is both more advanced and more feudally backward than our own – you need all the friends and allies you can get, especially when you’re pursued by the likes of the puritanical ranks of the Brotherhood who rather futilely, and hatefully, disseminate a gospel of genetic purity in an age when the atmosphere is tissue-thin and people are regularly baked to mutational breaking-point by the unrelenting UV rays it now admits, and bounty hunters such as the cyborg relentlessness than is the Preacher.

Kristoff’s grimly-imagined apocalyptic landscape, brought alive with glorious ferocity by an author with a gift for rapid and expansively-pleasing worldbuilding, is one festering with humanity vs. robot agitation, environmental collapse – animals are largely a thing of the past and plants exist in very small, threatened populations – enmity for your fellow human, and a prevailing sense that life is worth very little.

And yet, for all this woe, and the ever-present sensation that you could tumble off the existential abyss at any time, Eve is oddly happy.

Not giddily so since that’s well near impossible state of being in this blighted age, but as happy as you can be when your grandfather could die at any time, local street gangs are racing you to get to valuable salvage, your massive fighting robots is trounced in Roman-esque gladiatorial combat, someone wants your head for a bounty and you may just have the psychic ability to blow machines apart.

Right, so not so much happy as not dead, but until one terrible day, the worst day she’s ever had in fact, Eve is as content as anyone dangling off the edge of this mortal coil can be.

That one day though throws everything Eve ever knew into freefall, and as memories begin to seep in that suggest there is more to her past than she can remember, including the presence of a “Lifelike” (robots so close to being human that, perfect looks aside, they almost are) called Ezekiel, she is forced on the run with her ragtag family, unsure of who she really is, which of her memories are real (all of them? some? none?) and exactly where it is she’ll end up when all the madness is over.

If, of course, it is ever over.

As she and her beloved friends fight their way through rusted cities made of ships and cobbled-together, and twisting towers of steel and glass, and across nuclear wastelands of crystallised nothingness, Eve finds herself awash in a plethora of existential dilemmas, titanic battles for her soul and physical body and a gnawing sense that whoever she is, it’s a long, nightmarishly-exhausting way from who she once was.

“She thought of Ezekiel. Of Lemon. She wished she’d had a chance to try to make it right between her and them. Beneath the fury and the hurt, a part of her still loved them both. But it was like she’d told Raph that day in the library, she realized. It was only in fairy tales that everything turned out for the best.
Most people didn’t get a happy ending in real life.” (P. 363)

The brilliance and joy of Lifel1k3 is that Kristoff serves up a novel that is both bombastically action-oriented by deeply soulful and considered; it’s as if Michael Bay and George Miller met an earnest thoughtful indie film begetting a masterfully-engaging mix of full-speed ahead, bone-jarringly battles for survival with a stop-and-smell-the-flowers-and-wonder-why-they’re-there-at-all knowingness that works incredibly well every freaking step of the way.

This is the apocalypse with everything you’ve come to expect but with substance, thoughtfulness and a great big red heart on its sleeve that is, rather ironically, hidden in many ways until twist piles revelation, curtain-pullback alongside dazzling uncovering, in a messy game of life reveals that tests Eve’s sanity, sense of self and emotional cohesiveness.

If you want an apocalyptic novel that is accessible and heartfelt, possessed of wit, insight and an exhilaratingly, joyously affecting way with words, that creates a sense of visceral place both physically and emotionally, that puts the pedal to the metal (at one time literally) while asking a host of necessary questions that get you thinking even as you are ducking for cover from all kinds of narrative volleys, Lifel1k3 is your book, the best thing you’ll read now, or maybe in a messy, nasty but hopefully redemptive future.