Drop by Drop by Morgan Llywelyn

Published by Tor Books on June 26, 2018

Drop by Drop is a concept in search of a purpose. The concept is interesting. Everything made of petrochemicals, including plastics and most car tires, has started to disintegrate. Not everything has disintegrated at once, but things that aren't made of metal or wood are coming apart drop by drop, seemingly at random.

Here's how Morgan Llywelyn sets up the concept: Bank employee Dwayne Nyeberger sees Lila Ragland in the town of Sycamore River and is convinced she has come back to ruin him. Lila, the town’s party girl, has been missing and presumed dead for years. Eleanor Bennett, whose bank card was just rejected by an ATM as it turned to goo, doesn’t need Nyeberger's drama. Other bank customers are having similar problems; their cards, like the pens in the bank, are dissolving, drop by drop. Head teller Bea Fontaine asks her worldly nephew, Jack Reece, what might be making the plastic melt, but he doesn’t have a clue.

So far, so good. But having established the concept, what does Llywelyn do with it? Not nearly enough. Lila was planning to bring cybercrime to Sycamore River but that plan went south when her AllCom (a futuristic smartphone) melted to goo. Robert Bennett, the town’s wealthy industrialist, dies in an explosion at his company headquarters. His widow, Nell, gets over that pretty quickly and begins a romance. The plot offers an underdeveloped murder mystery, a dull love story, and the banging drums of a Sino-Russian war that nobody knows much about, given the difficulty of obtaining news in the age of goo.

As a post-apocalyptic novel, Drop by Drop is surprisingly uneventful. Since “the Change” happens slowly, people adapt to it with a minimum of fuss. They complain about horse manure in the streets when a local entrepreneur opens a horse-and-buggy taxi service, but readers might find it difficult to view an excess of horse poo as an apocalyptic event.

Perhaps the story is meant to demonstrate the resilience of humanity by showing how the characters cope with a life without plastic, but mostly they cope by meeting in a tavern once a week and pondering the cause of the Change, which [mild spoiler] we never learn [/mild spoiler]. However, the characters are so drab that challenging them with an actual crisis might at least have motivated them to do something interesting. Some characters refer to head teller Bea as “Aunt Bea,” and she reminded me of Aunt Bea from the old Andy Griffith Show — a pleasant person who frets a good bit but has no discernable personality. Most of the characters in the book could be described in the same way. The Andy Griffith Show at least had Barney Fife and Otis the town drunk to add humor to a sedate town. The characters in Sycamore River inspire yawns rather than laughs.

Drop by Drop is apparently the first novel of a trilogy, so explanations of key events in the novel might eventually be forthcoming. So little happens in Drop by Drop, however, that I don’t feel motivated to read the remaining novels. The concept is interesting, but Llywelyn’s purpose in writing the novel never becomes clear. If she meant to say something meaningful, she had an entire book in which hint at it. I lack the patience to read two more novels to figure out why she wrote this one.

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