When the United States collapses into post-apocalyptic ruin, The Woman flees her suburban home. Chronicling her life from the first shock to building and ruling a dieselpunk fiefdom, her mind deteriorates, and she obtains a nuclear weapon.
One hundred years later, a boy feeds her journals to an AI to answer lingering questions about his heritage. When the AI becomes sentient, weaving its own stories about The Woman and what her final moments might have been, the boy must confront a deranged power just like the person it was created to emulate.
Told through journal entries, Cataclysm is a story of how unrepentant rage permeates generations.
"With the sharp, compelling, and dark tones of Gillian Flynn's novels, Tiffany Meuret writes us to the edge of our seats in Cataclysm as suburbia and AI seamlessly collide in this cynical, deranged, smart, apocalyptic novel. Try putting it down after you start."
— Kayli Scholz, author of Saint Grit
"Tiffany Meuret leaves no punch un-pulled in Cataclysm. Through the journal entries of a woman living through the death throes of a doomed society, this powerfully unsettling novel clings like a film of nuclear dust."
— Claire Rudy Foster, author of The Rain Artist
"I should have made note as I read, of the many lines in this book which startled me with their ability to clearly, concisely, and terrifyingly encapsulate the human tragedy, but I was too swept up in the story to distinguish myself from it. Tiffany Meuret has thoroughly outdone herself - and the rest of us - with CATACLYSM. It’s a common enough vanity, to decline to name the protagonist of a book, but so rarely does it accomplish this: the complete absorption of the reader into the character. Even what might seem particular, the fact that she is The Woman and not The Man, in the end evaporates into simply the being of human.
"It’s hard to describe what this book is, except to say it’s a diary of all our times. A diary of both the wretched and the beautiful ways we love, we let go, and we hold on, to our sorrow. Above all it is a diary of our time, as we wrestle with the question of what it means to be human and what it means to be other. Perhaps CATACLYSM is horror, perhaps it is science fiction, perhaps it is literary fiction, but it is in any incarnation an excoriation of our impulses, of what drives us and of how we lie to ourselves.
"No spoilers, but I do feel compelled to say this: Dearie, you are wrong. You may be the most human of us all. I did save for myself one line, which is heartbreakingly relevant in its immediacy: '[People] fight only what they can see, which is each other.'
If only we could grow into something more than people."
— Cassondra Windwalker, author of Idle Hands and What Hides in the Cupboards
