Turner Falls, Oregon, in the rearview mirror. Middle fingers up as we drive. We leave these fucking animals behind.

With The Loop, Jeremy Robert Johnson has managed something that, until now, I thought impossible: breathing new life into the sci-fi/horror conspiracy thriller genre that was so popular in the 80s and 90s. Like so much new code written into the existing canon of King and Koontz, those arbiters of scrappy teens doing impossible things in the face of government–or in this case corporate–evil (think King’s Firestarter or The Institute or Koontz’s Watchers or Fear Nothing), Johnson has inserted himself into the hive mind and taken full control.

The Loop follows Lucy, a Peruvian orphan adopted as a child by the super-sweet but milquetoast Hendersons of Turner Falls, Oregon, and her best friend/sidekick Bakhit (or Bucket, if you like) who spend their evenings eating convenience store pretzels and flipping through the record stacks at The Exchange, attempting to navigate the pitfalls of growing up in a Pacific Northwest town ruled by ultra rich tech workers and their degenerate offspring. You see, some time ago a bunch of tech firms up and moved en masse to the small town of Turner Falls in the high desert of Oregon, and things have gotten increasingly capital-W Weird ever since. In an absolutely bat-shit opening chapter, two of Lucy’s classmates die and another goes missing, and a talk radio conspiracy jockey starts sniffing around the edges of a murder-suicide that doesn’t quite add up.

When the remainder of the school year is canceled due to these tragedies, the students celebrate with a raging party in a lava cave under the outskirts of town. Lucy and Bucket, accompanied by cute, deep-thinking burnout Brewer, descend the ladders into the cave, hoping to have a good time, or at least to forget for a time the worried faces of their families, but when the party ends abruptly, they find themselves in an unending nightmare, one that proves harder and harder to rise from, and the only way out of it is through. The rich kids of Turner Falls were always cruel, but this is something different.

But Lucy will fix it. “We’re not meat, Buck. Not anymore,” she says, and she means it. She is done being mistreated by the world. Armed with a heavy wrench and a hardening heart, Lucy learns that she would do anything to save herself and her people. Anything.

Jeremy Robert Johnson fills these pages with an incredible amount of heart, of the emotional variety and the ripped out and still beating on the ground variety. The Loop is such a hard book, a gruesome, brutal book, but at its core is all the emotion of the best coming-of-age novels, the friendships that you cling to in order to avoid being sucked under, the budding romances with surprising people, cruel rich kids, all the confusion of class and race and gender, and teenage protagonists that actually feel like teenagers instead of one-note archetypes. One might think that emotion and realism would temper the book’s crazed brutality, create a distance, make it palatable, but instead it has the effect of making each gut-punch strike with increasing power. It will make you feel every ounce of Lucy’s anger and violence until it is your own.

Exciting stories are often compared to rollercoaster rides with their dips and rises and sudden drops, but this one is more like a freefall: once it starts there are no more rises, only an uncontrolled drop into the unknown. And like the characters in the book, you hope for a safety that seems like it may never come until eventually, you just hope for the ground.

The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson was published in September 2020 by Saga Press. I received my copy from Night Worms book club in their October 2020 package, Creep It Real.