Sweet & Salty Reviews - The Drop by Jacy Morris

The Dish
The Drop by Jacy Morris is a globe-trotting jaunt around a ruined world ravaged by the boyband apocalypse. It’s a fusion of first-person memoir and epistolary in the vein of World War Z and Zombie Apocalypse. When Blackthorn Book Tours dropped this into my inbox, I knew I needed to learn more. How exactly does a boyband destroy the world anyway? Well, I found out.

The Sauce
Whoa-Town are the biggest pop music sensation since the Beatles. Their sound is ubiquitous. And that’s a shame, because their latest single, The Drop, causes a strange and fatal disease that brings the entire world to its knees. Living in the aftermath, Katherine Maddox sets out to learn the truth about the Drop and, hopefully, prevent it from ever happening again.

The Sweet
Jacy Morris loves to write. You only have to look at his bibliography to see that. It’s also evident in his sometimes ‘stream of consciousness’ writing style, pulling you into the head of Katherine Maddox as she lives through, and then seeks to learn from, the boyband apocalypse.

The Drop’s biggest draw is the mysterious disease it’s named for. Morris has carefully constructed a multi-stage disease and details its bizarre symptoms throughout the middle third of the book. Through the eyes of Katherine Maddox, journalism student, we see the sickness unfolding, first in her housemate, then her father. The use of inoperable cancer as a yardstick gives an easy frame of reference for the reader to understand Katherine’s pain, and the chaos and uncertainty that unfolds is eerily familiar in the context of current events.

The relationship between Katherine and her father is lovingly drawn and gives the book real backbone. It also gives Katherine a strong driving motivation to see out the rest of the story. Morris plants the seeds for the book’s reveal very early on and these bear fruit in the final section when the truth about the Drop is finally revealed. Morris has planned his novel well and the conclusion is a coherent endpoint that the rest of the story had clearly been leading to all along.

The Salty
My most major criticism of The Drop is that the epistolary sections don’t add much more than colour. Katherine’s first-person memoir and old journal entries tend to capture the essence of the story’s events and the chat room conversations, magazine articles and interview transcripts peppered throughout don’t do much more than reiterate what was already said. I will, however, give Morris credit for a particularly creepy chat room snippet showing Whoa-Town fans as emotionless dolls after they contract The Drop because it is actually quite chilling.

Morris has made an effort to nuance his characters. Katherine Maddox is the prime example and easily the strongest character in the book. However, despite attempts to juxtapose the members of Whoa-Town as members of a wholesome, accessible pop group on one hand and criminals, liars and sexual deviants on the other, this has led the character development down unfortunately stereotypical channels. The gay character hates women, the white trash character from Florida is in an incestuous relationship, the black character is a pimp, the trans character is manipulative, the nerdy kid is forgettable. Even Katherine herself is the diehard, ‘anything for a story’ reporter we’ve all seen many, many times before.

There’s also a minor issue with some of the characters not being as useful to the story as they could be. Ella, a deaf girl, would have been a perfect and justifiably diverse central character, but she parts ways with the story after only a chapter, and the introduction of the Merv character in the latter third doesn’t add much to the overall narrative. Unfortunately, other than Katherine and, to a lesser extent, Freddie, many of the characters in the book are there solely to deliver a payload of information to further the story before bowing out, never to return.

The Aftertaste
The Drop has the conceptual strength and emotional punch of a heavyweight post-apocalypse novel. Morris’s careful consideration of the symptoms of his boyband-induced pandemic, coupled with Katherine Maddox’s personal story of heartache and determination, drive the story relentlessly from one chilling or heart-wrenching revelation to the next, building to a conclusion that really couldn’t have played out any other way.

It's an admirably plotted tale that betrays Morris’s love of writing on every page as he digs into the motivations of his characters and the consequences of The Drop for the world. Morris digs deep into human nature, as well as social and economic issues, to create a rich tapestry of a world that can no longer trust music.

If you are looking for a different take on the apocalypse, one without the usual shambling ghouls, especially a story with heart and conviction, I’d recommend The Drop.

Thanks to the team at Blackthorn Book Tours for my review copy of this book.