The Animals Praise the Antichrist - Alex Older

It's time to write it all down. I don't know how much longer I'm going to stay. I'm writing it for me and I'm writing it for you, even though you'll probably never see it. I'm talking to you, Christa, and to no one else.

Filled with yearning for lost love, writing against the backdrop of a world in chaos, Alex records an intimate account of his time with Christa, his half-Swedish girlfriend, who disappeared seven years earlier in opaque circumstances.

In an isolated part of England, the lonely teenagers forge a defiant and passionate relationship. Alex's father is a bully and an alcoholic; Christa has her own profound family sorrows. The two bond over their deep love of music and a concern for animal welfare. But even as they exchange troubling secrets, sharing stories of cruelties suffered, losses endured, and vengeance taken, the couple become aware that a mysterious group of outsiders is watching over them, a group who would lure them to experiences more disturbing still. What do these strangers want? What are the bitter truths they want the young lovers to learn? And why are they convinced that the darkness within Christa is the key to the fate of the world?

Though its central couple are adolescents, here is a book that explores startlingly adult terrain. Even as Alex and Christa are drawn into excitement and adventure, they must confront the inescapable horrors of existence: death, the twin traumas of consciousness and history, the fates of animals forced to share the planet with a truly ferocious species: us.

Until they stand on the brink of changing everything - forever.

Energetic, compulsively readable, The Animals Praise the Antichrist is nonetheless an exceptionally unsettling novel.