Cults, Climate Crisis, and Community in Delaney Nolan’s “Happy Bad” https://ift.tt/Rr2utcD
I read Delaney Nolan’s excellent debut novel, Happy Bad, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene’s devastation of Western North Carolina (where I reside) and just after the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of Louisiana. As the memories of past hurricanes and fear of future devastating storms pile upon one another, a Southern novel, wishing to take the pulse of the moment, needs to account for these storms, the heat, the humidity, and the sea level rise, much as Faulkner engaged with the Civil War and its aftermath. Nolan’s novel is profoundly responsive to an emerging historical circumstance, joining the proliferating ranks of climate fiction like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.
Happy Bad’s narrator, Beatrice Campbell, works as a coordinator at Twin Bridge, a mental health residential treatment center for girls based in Askewn, a fictional town in the Texas plains.. The story begins at a juncture: due to the success of a drug trial (called BeZen) on the residents, the parent company Tender Kare plans to move the facility’s staff and remaining patients to Atlanta, Georgia, where a new building awaits. On the cusp of their move, a massive blackout strikes the region. Beatrice and her companions (facility staff, several of the patients, and her potential romantic interest, Frank) are forced to evacuate. As the regional chaos grows, border crossings shut down, forcing them to flee even further south into coastal Louisiana, where they find stability in the town of Houma.
Nolan intersperses this tense and compelling adventure with scenes from Beatrice’s childhood in Edenton, North Carolina; we learn of the slow dissolution of her family, home, and ultimately the town itself. The decline of her father’s health leads to increasingly unhinged behavior: Beatrice’s parents eventually join a cult and abandon their daughters and their debt-ridden, uninsurable home. The novel ends with the narrator leaving Edenton and her sister Jemma for Askewn and beginning her work at Twin Bridge.
The novel’s “soft apocalypse,” as the narrator might call it, is set in the near future and bears many of the markers of dystopian science fiction. The United States has become a patchwork of climate disaster areas—floods covering towns with water for months on end, wildfires, resource scarcity, blackouts, hurricanes, massive heat waves, and southern Louisiana pummeled by the sea. This setting is paired with another kind of dystopia: the residential home, underfunded, understaffed, and focused on experimental drug trials rather than deep cures. Various “novums” populate this world: the pink card that allows travel across state borders, automated border drones, the cult of Double Truthism, and of course the drug “BeZen.” In Happy Bad, the planet provides no stability or safety; neither do institutions or governments.
But I hesitate to call this science fiction or dystopia, because this world feels both plausible and imminent: what would have felt, twenty years ago, like a fairly extreme climate apocalypse novel reads like tomorrow’s news, or even yesterday’s. Nolan’s journalistic attention to city names, grocery stores, and Southern environments speaks to realism, but her attention to the impoverished, and the general overbearingness of their circumstances, suggests that the most appropriate lens with which to read her work is something like naturalism.
Appropriate to that genre, the prevailing mood of this novel is bleak resilience. There are, to be sure, moments of humorous absurdity (Edenton’s turkey vulture mayor, whom the narrator and her father attempt to assassinate) and some moments of intimacy and shared communal belonging (between the staff, and between Beatrice and Frank). The ending of the novel, set in Houma, a cobbled together community of refugees, offers its most hopeful vision, in which people embrace temporariness. “Everybody in Houma,” the narrator tells us, “knew Houma wouldn’t last.” Such an attitude means that pleasures are fleeting, but that problems pass with time, like the narrator’s guilt around forging reports on the effects of BeZen. Resilience comes from an embrace of the momentary and a detachment from expectation. Beatrice expresses this sentiment when she reflects on a lesson taught to the girls early in the novel about jellyfish, which are successful because “they need basically nothing” to survive. The narrator finds an important revelation here: “In order to thrive,” she concludes, “you must thrive on nothing; you must love nothing.”
Beatrice embraces this grim lesson early in the novel, and the extent to which she, or any character, changes over their harrowing emergency adventure from Texas to Louisiana is ambiguous. The Twin Bridge staff and Frank find fleeting connections with one another that do not seem to have staying power. The lives of the girls presumably improve after detoxing from BeZen and returning to their families. Beatrice’s development, meanwhile, occurs through backstory: we learn more about how she became adept at forging grimly resourceful solutions to absurd situations, than about how she grows throughout the current crisis. Beatrice does not learn to be a better custodian of the children, or learn how to form a stronger bond with Frank or her co-workers, or truly reconcile with the trauma of her past. At best, Beatrice learns to be more comfortable in temporary equilibrium.
Given all of this, I find it remarkable how enjoyable this book is. Nolan has accomplished an impressive feat, writing a novel with a clear eye toward the horrors that await us in the near future, but with the readability of a less weighty story. Some of this comes from the tight, well-paced plot, and some of it comes from careful wordsmithing, like the description of a polluted Louisiana sky as a “psycho Easter palette.” I cannot recall the last work of climate fiction that made the crisis feel quite so imminent as Happy Bad, from the intolerable heat to the mental stress and dissolution of community. As someone living in the South, waiting for the next big hurricane or heat wave, I did not finish this novel with a renewed sense of hope, and that is precisely why I have such appreciation for it.
FICTION Happy Bad
By Delaney Nolan
Astra House
Published October 14, 2025
0 Commentaires