Synopsis
From the dark and twisted mind behind the podcast sensation The Magnus Archives comes a suffocating, socially charged nightmare that reveals how fear festers in the cracks of everyday life…
Beneath the streets of London, it hungers…
It’s the hottest summer on record and the city is suffering. Prices are high, pay is low. And on one fateful morning five travelers find themselves trapped in a tube car deep in the London Underground.
It will change their lives forever.
By the time they leave the train they will be bound together as witnesses to a single horrific event. Something terrible, irreversible, and monstrous. Something hungry.
But they can’t remember what it is.
On their own, they each begin to experience strange dissociative events. Time gets lost. Friends disappear. Something stalks them in the shadows. They make an unlikely team, but to remember what they encountered that day on the train, they will have to work together. Because now it’s up to them to understand what horror they saw – and stop it in its tracks before it drags everyone else down below.
Review
It’s the haves versus the have-nots in the London Underground, and all that’s at stake is the fate of the world in Jonathan Sims’s The Burn Line.
A small group of passengers awaken on a subway car, unaware of what’s happened only moments before but uneasily certain they’ve missed something, even if they don’t know exactly what. One believes he’s having yet another dissociative episode; another thinks they’ve fallen asleep, while another thinks they must be getting ill. None remember the horror of what has just transpired around them, and the only evidence that something had been amiss at all is the greasy ash-like substance each inadvertently comes into contact with as they exit at their next terminal and an uneasy feeling that haunts them over the following days. Soon, they feel like they’re being watched, even hunted, as an outside force draws them together once more…
The Burn Line has an almost Koontz-ian flair to it during its early goings-on. Classic 1980s Koontz, I mean. Not the conservative, post-hair transplant, all dogs are oh so mystical and should be worshipped with religious fervor Koontz. The Koontz that wrote Strangers, which centered around a disparate collection of people with little in common save for forcibly suppressed memories and the fear that terrorizes them and draws them together to a desert motel. The Burn Line positively echoes Strangers in certain ways, at times feeling like a necessary 21st Century update that’s all too relevant to our here and now.
Sims draws his five central characters together slowly, methodically, allowing for plenty of character development and giving each the chance to stand on their own and become familiar to the reader. Each has a distinctive voice and background, and Sims draws from the diverse and multicultural affair of modern-London. There’s the Ghanaian train operator, Senyo, with a bum leg; trans Natasha with the nutjob roommate; Elise with the new job doing coding for the city’s transportation office; homeless Aaron; and Will, a finance broker with a six-figure salary.
Each notice the odd smell and catch the ever-so-brief sight of something that shouldn’t be stalking them through the city. And while The Burn Line carries the whiff of a monster book, the real horror is late-stage capitalism. Sims’s London is a pre-apocalyptic nightmare – a grim, if accurate, reflection on the current state of our world circa 2026 – with its still-relevant concerns surrounding the recent pandemic, unnaturally hot temperatures, a flagging economy, and artificially overpriced buildings standing empty amidst an on-going gentrification and the padding of investment portfolios. This is a city bright and shiny with the influx of elite wealth, but if you look closer it’s nothing but high-priced rot and decay. And, let’s face it, this isn’t just London; it’s everywhere and anywhere these days, so long as there’s money to be made and people to be fucked over.
Sims’s leads come from various socioeconomic backgrounds, with Will obviously being the best off financially, at least for a time. He’s the one that has to face the biggest reckoning, as he’s introduced to the world as it really is rather than the one that has been presented to him. It’s a world his trauma-bonded friends already know all too well. But let’s be honest, it’s a reckoning a lot of us better off than most (and how quickly that can turn on a dime) folks should – in fact, must – face sooner rather than later, of being confronted with how thin the veneer really is on all the propaganda and whitewashing of history. Of grappling with a present-day based on past atrocities of colonization, of living in a country founded on stolen land and built on genocide and slavery, of finding out what a douchebag Christopher Columbus really was. Of the rich giving you just enough in wages that you don’t starve to death but can’t really save, promising you empty platitudes, redirecting your anger toward one another instead of at them, and offering just enough false comforts to stave off the guillotine. Telling you this new data center will transform the city and provide jobs, but not telling you it’ll only hire ten people, drive up your utility costs a hundredfold, and turn your drinking water into plague-ridden brown sludge, and that they need all your land to tear down your home for new power lines to feed the data center while they get tax break upon tax break to make them richer and richer and richer. All you gotta do is pull yourself up by your bootstraps, trade the black lung of your grandparent’s day for some radical new cancer, eat the diarrhea lettuce, pay them monthly fees so you can work as a beta tester in your off hours for their newest get rich quick pyramid scheme of broken AI apps, on top of paying all the shiny new tariffs, and enjoy a world full of unending wildfires, catastrophic heat waves, torrential flooding, school shootings, global pandemics, and melting ice caps. It’s the art of the deal, folks! Come and get it!
The Burn Line is grounded firmly in all these real-world horrors and anxieties – not the fake pabulum of an almost-trillionaire’s worries about Black and trans actors being cast in Hollywood’s version of a Greek epic or the daily petty grievances of a sundowning, grifting, money laundering, pedophile president meant to distract you, but the real ones. The skyrocketing costs of simply living, of surviving in a world hellbent on destroying you for a healthier bottom line, that demands your body and soul in toto because at the end of the day, you’re not really human at all. Hell, you’re little more than just another cow in the slaughterhouse, never expecting the sudden killing blow of a nail through your skull. You’re just food for the rich, same as it ever was. That’s the world Will has to struggle to understand, to survive in and fight against, so fully was he sold on all the artifice, so comfortable was he in all the glory and protections of his white privilege and the belief that he was safe.
Even through the fantastical horrors lying in wait in the London underbelly, there’s a grim, even fatalistic, realism threaded through the empathetic beating heart of it all. Sims cares about his downtrodden cast, and he recognizes that the only way to survive against the horde of the insatiable rich is to stick together, to build found families and communities that can see past skin color and ethnicities and shrinking bank accounts. To organize. Senyo, for example, is the de facto paternal figure, but also a strong and smart union man. We need guys like him now more than ever. We care about these characters because we can see ourselves in each of them. We are them. Some of us will realize this right from the outset. Others will deny it, as Will initially does, and probably even decry it as woke because they honestly think they’re just some temporarily inconvenienced, down on their luck billionaire, too, still asleep enough to believe the dream. Sims, though, he’s awake and he sees things for what they are, metaphorically and realistically, but also righteously, deservedly angrily. You can take that to the bank.
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