We Burned So Bright
2026
A rogue black hole is a month out from consuming Earth, and Don and Rodney, married for forty years, load up their RV and drive from Maine to Washington State, carrying a wooden box holding part of the ashes of their late son, Jeremy, whom they never gave up on even through his mental illness. Their destination is a fire lookout tower, where they mean to finally keep a promise to him they’d put off for years. Along the way, they meet a wide range of people responding to the end of the world in every possible way, and the two men reflect on whether the life they built together, and with Jeremy, was enough.
I never read any of Klune’s other books, so I had no prior expectations going in, and I still found myself wishing for less mystery and more Don, Rodney, and Jeremy. I dislike it when authors withhold the reason behind a journey just to manufacture suspense, and that’s exactly what happens here: the book teases where they’re going and why for most of its length instead of just telling you. The side characters they meet are distinct enough, and I understood why they were there, each one is a different way of facing death, but I would rather have spent that time with Don and Rodney unpacking their grief over Jeremy directly. Klune’s prose is thoughtful throughout, and the ending, once it finally gets to Jeremy’s story, hit hard enough that I’d have happily read a book built entirely around that. It’s the kind of story that gets you thinking about what actually matters with the time you have, even if the road there took longer than it needed to.
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