Termush

November 1, 2023
Well-to-do survivors of a post-apocalyptic disaster hole up in an exclusive hotel. When unbelievable events regularly happen before our eyes, it's instructive to have artifacts to give them context--for instance, this buried treasure, originally published by Danish novelist Holm in 1967, translated contemporaneously by British novelist Clayton, and resurrected from the archives with a new introduction by SF lighthouse keeper Jeff VanderMeer. It's a slim novel, but its universal setting and farsighted themes combine with the author's eerie minimalism to make it feel as modern as it is avant-garde. "Everything went according to plan..." says the anonymous narrator, making observations from the titular hotel where a wealthy group of survivors are sheltering from deadly radiation outside. We learn that the narrator enrolled in the program some years ago, promised "a guarantee of help" when the time came, complete with protective shelters, security personnel, and uncontaminated food and water. Before long, things begin to go wrong, from the near-constant radiation alarms that drive Termush's inhabitants underground to dead birds falling from the air to the arrival of other survivors quickly labeled enemies. Inevitably, the denizens of the resort are transformed. Like the privileged tourists playing dress-up in dystopian fictions like Westworld or White Lotus, our narrator and the other residents of Termush devolve to their basest instincts sooner than you'd think: "We paid money to go on living in the same way that one once paid health insurance; we bought the commodity called survival, and according to all existing contracts no one has the right to take it from us or make demands upon it." When brandy and sedatives fail and violence and death follow, the survivors of Termush soon learn that money doesn't provide as much insulation as it did in the Before Times. A prescient parable that finds the rich dismayed with what happens after the world ends.

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Starred review from November 27, 2023
Holm, who died in 2019, makes his U.S. debut with an excellent portrayal of nuclear destruction that—though it was originally published in 1967—speaks to the recent impact of Covid-19. Termush is a luxury coastal resort where patrons receive temporary respite from the nuclear fallout that consumes the world just outside its chandeliers, swimming pools, and fine art. Radiation meters keep track of drifting phosphorous, guests have their urine checked for radiation, and the management does its best to insulate them from the blasted landscape, mass death, and desperate survivors beyond the resort’s gates. The insomniac narrator trusts only the radio and an enchanting fellow guest named Maria, with whom he begins to discover a truth that Termush’s staff struggles to conceal. Soon, however, there’s no denying the bodies piling up, the strangers trespassing in the hotel’s rarified atmosphere, or the blaring alarms that foretell pandemonium. The images and motif are nightmarish, as are the narrator’s creeping revelations: “Is nothing changed, can everything be swept away as a dream is swept out of the conscious mind in the morning?” This vision of apocalyptic horror and class critique contains multitudes.

Starred review from February 1, 2024

In this hypnotic 1967 Danish novella, translated in 1969 by Sylvia Clayton, well-to-do doomsday preppers holed up in the specially outfitted seaside resort of Termush tentatively emerge from their fallout shelters into a world that appears unchanged. Management takes precautions against the invisible miasma of radiation and doles out the comforts of home. Soft music plays over speakers while the guests tamp down their incomprehension, desperate for normalcy amidst a pervasive uncertainty that invades their dreams. Then the first outsider arrives. COVID-era readers may nod with recognition at such uncanny details as contact tracing, seemingly arbitrary threat levels, distrust of medical authorities, and the rise of a xenophobic "chairman" whose "primitive blend of cunning and stupidity attracts supporters to rally round behind him," even as he opines that "an inspired lie could be preferred to a malignant truth." VERDICT Holm's enigmatic fable deftly imagines from the inside out what might become of our fragile societal and mental constructs when the world as we knew it is gone, placing it alongside such psychologically acute post-apocalyptic rediscoveries as Marlen Haushofer's The Wall and Kay Dick's They.

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