The Deluge
by Stephen Markley
Simon & Schuster 2023

Shallow characters, under-explored topics and stale dialogue quickly dry up The Deluge, a new novel from Stephen Markley. Markley’s debut novel Ohio garnered resounding acclaim in 2018, and the author is back with an unedited post-January 6th tome that ponders a near-future on Earth as temperatures, sea levels, artificial intelligence, agitated right-wing extremists, and theocratic political leaders all rise at alarming rates. And who better to try and redirect all that doom than a roster of humorless, one-dimensional characters plucked right off the progressive stack.

Conflicting political ideologies take shape in two characters, which the novel ultimately hinges on. There’s The Pastor (a washed-up actor who ascends to Christian right-wing mega-stardom, speaking out against things such as social justice protests), and the young climate justice demi-celebrity Kate Morris. The central question holding its breath underwater for all 900 pages boils down to whether a host of catastrophes can be avoided or will society and the planet fold in on itself? Will the US government continue to elevate leaders who turn a blind eye to these issues, or can underground vigilante justice networks influence the political system enough to stir up a sea change?

The novel’s themes are bleak, so Markley tries to alleviate the heavy stuff with humor. Jokes are infused into much of the dialogue (typically saved as a zinger at the end of a paragraph). The jokes never land; they sound more like punchlines written into a 90’s sitcom teed up for a laugh track. Each character seems to also have the exact same sense of humor (which quickly becomes apparent is just the author’s) further flattening the entire cast. And for a book set in the near future - the early 2030s - the references Markley uses for jokes, asides and digressions date back to the 2010s and earlier, begging the question if pop culture just simply froze over in the intervening years. In 2034, protestors at the Washington Monument link arms and sing Pharrell’s 2013 song Happy. While hiking with an off-the-grid Native American woman named after a 2016 Billie Eilish song (Ocean Eyes), Shane makes a callback to Trump-era pussy hat wearing, brunching, Netflix-binging protestors in 2036. These references might make sense for a contemporary narrative, but what good is it to envision a future full of advancements in technology, diversity and politics if art and culture don’t appear to also progress with the times?

Characters’ backstories also get injected into the second half of the book as afterthoughts, leaving some plot reveals to fall flat. His bloated scene setting style becomes repetitive, too. Many details are given at the upfront, but very few of them end up meaning anything later on, much less moving any action in the plot. This pattern starts to render much of the long paragraphs of detail irrelevant. If some minor details don’t influence the plot, why should the reader keep tabs of them at all? It’s clear Markley went into writing The Deluge with a lot of research behind him but all those words amount to nothing but filler prose, spitballed onto the page to beef up the page count. Under the weight of all this research and info-dumping, the narrative tension droops. Characters and their motivations get lost in the shuffle, and it’s not until most of the players get mowed down by gunfire that you remember what the novel’s actually concerned with.

Characters also, curiously, spend a lot of time ‘staring’ in the middle of scenes. Staring at their wine glasses. Staring at the floor. Staring out at the snow. And when they’re not staring they’re ‘gazing.’ Awkward phrasing and word choice soaks The Deluge throughout, adding to the book’s unbelievability. Instead of simply falling asleep, Fred takes a pill to ‘knock him into dreamlessness.’ Kate refers to her female cohorts as the ‘vagina squad’ who she says The Pastor will force to carry pregnancies from their ‘mistaken’ sexual partners. Once you pick up on this tic, it really pulls you out of the story.

The Deluge is also woefully woke-washed. There is one cookie cutter, stereotypical character after another. Diverse characters can accomplish a lot in a novel, but Markley leaves it up to the reader to fill in the blanks for him. There’s a Black woman, Gail, (whose ‘wide-hipped’ body and ‘round breasts’ are objectified within the first few dozen pages.) There’s non-binary Coral (whose gender non-conforming experience in an increasingly conservative and dangerous America is completely ignored); there’s also some Indian men (one gets described as ‘clearly of Hindu extraction’, another as with ‘the dot, not the feather’). It could be exciting to see how the author rounds out these characters into fully believable humans, with rich emotional lives, navigating such a global story. But instead, these people are quickly sketched out with cheap, unsatisfying stereotypes and cast out to sea without so much as arm floaties.

When Markley switches it up to focus on one or two tertiary characters’ experience with poverty, addiction or relationship struggles, the dialogue is marginally more convincing than what fills the rest of the book. But, even then, the use of second person in these sections is disorienting, and you’ll have to decide for yourself if you want to dive back in once these vignettes end.

The novel does pick up pace briefly, if you can wade through the first half. With a tighter focus on fewer characters, fewer plot lines, a lot less research copypasta, and more realistic dialogue, The Deluge could have been a tidal wave of a book. Instead, it circles the drain. As one character, Jeffrey, sings to his girlfriend while ‘urinating on his own shit stain’ a whole 300 pages before the novel’s sputtering end: “Babe, you gotta pee the poop away. You’ve got to peeee theeee poop awaaaaay.” To the tune of a 1965 Beatles song, no less.

Emma Miles is a book reviewer working in Minneapolis.