Two friends, Jesse and Storey, emerge from the forests of Maine after a hunting trip to discover burned out and deserted towns, a lack of cell signal, and armed adversaries hell bent on killing anything that moves. What exactly happened while they were in the woods? How can they find out and will they see their families again?

BURN is at times captivating; the mystery surrounding the cause of the destruction had me speed reading through the first half of the story. I absolutely loved how Heller eventually revealed the cause of the chaos, but I found that after the reveal, I struggled at times to maintain interest. I didn’t find it anti-climactic or that the reveal itself was in any way unsatisfactory, I just felt like maybe the excitement of not knowing what was happening was a big contributor in why I was enjoying my time with the novel.

The novel is also of two worlds – one being the present and the ongoing, high-pressure events and the other dealing with flashbacks of Jesse’s past and his friendship with Storey. I felt the latter wasn’t as strong as the former and at times I experienced my attention waning. It’s not that it was poorly told, it just didn’t capture my imagination like the intense scenes featuring the two bypassing armed militia while trying to make their way out of Maine. It generally didn’t work for me during those moments of splitting the narrative.

Peter Heller is an exceptional writer and to date, I’ve enjoyed most of his work. I feel like this novel could have been something great, and while I loved the world-building he employed, the backstory tended to slow things down to a fault.