By Ron Currie Jr.

If you’re the kind of person who needs to get a lot done today, then I’ll be honest, you may not want to start reading Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr. this morning. I warn you that if your experience reading this book in any way resembles mine, you’ll find yourself curled up with it at midnight under a single light bulb, realizing that for the last 16 hours every free moment you’ve had got spent reading this exhilarating, passionate novel. You’ll dimly remember riding the subway to and from work, eating lunch, taking a bathroom break or three, but it’s background noise. The book in your hands feels more real than the bed underneath you, and as you race toward the end of the book, desperate to know the end of each character’s narrative thread, you’ll be dreading looking up and reality setting back in. So, fair warning.

Everything Matters!, Currie’s first novel, begins in the womb, where protagonist Junior Thibodeau is bequeathed a prophecy by the voice of unknown, omniscient entities. Simply enough: in about thirty-six years a comet is going to collide with the Earth, destroying all human life as we know it. This is an absolute certainty, and there’s nothing Junior can do about it. And so it begins; Junior is born and the novel briskly switches perspective between his parents and older brother, his girlfriend, and the unknown entities, all interspersed with a relentless countdown toward zero that ticks down the left side of the page. Junior comes of age grappling with the prophecy, his position as unlikely savior and genius, as well as his several crippling addictions. Currie writes his and the others’ stories with a deftness that keeps the reader hooked, liberally mixing darkness, humor, pathos, and absurdity. He pitches the crushing certainty of the apocalypse with the desperate, kinetic course of his characters searching for love and the right choices in an existential wilderness. If it sounds like this mid-sized novel bites off more than it can chew, don’t fear; Currie’s masterful pacing and unsentimental prose provide a firm foundation for the increasingly high-stakes narrative. Junior careens through frantic episodes of domestic terrorism, government conspiracy, cancer and assassins, careening toward inevitable planet-roasting doom.

Currie’s first book of short stories, God Is Dead, built a diverse range of vignettes out of the titular event, never sacrificing realism despite the high concept, and Everything Matters! similarly pulls no punches while delving much deeper. It grabs your attention by the collar and your emotional investment comes tumbling after. Once you reach its final chapter it may leave you gasping, then demand your next few days or weeks as you ruminate on the Big Questions it’s addressed. Finish your chores, plug in your phone, and go start it. Now.