That Orpen’s childhood is the most idyllic part of the narrative says much about the brutal world of Last Ones Left Alive. A story of a young woman’s survival against an army of zombie-like creatures known as skrakes, the book has strong feminist overtones and a style that places it in the crossover genre of adult and young adult readers. This comes through in the prose, which is clear and visual and seeks to show through example the almost impossible odds stacked against the heroine ... The author excels at macabre detail...Davis-Goff blends narrow and wide lens writing to good effect ... Davis-Goff...is particularly good at writing violence ... Orpen is an admirably fierce heroine, and not just in her physicality.
Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive sits uneasily between science fiction and horror, which places it in an ideal place to offer readers a harrowing vision of the near future ... Last Ones Left Alive can at times feel like a distinctly feminist, Irish spin on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Both books explore the psychology of a lone protagonist who has to deal with the fractured remains of humanity; both books explore the effect of hunting monsters on their protagonist’s soul. Davis-Goff tells a taut and harrowing story here, but it’s also one that allows for moments of hope. In an era of fiction that embraces bleakness, this novel’s suggestion that all may not be lost comes as a hard-fought and resonant statement of humanism, even when humanity can seem lost.
Sarah Davis-Goff has Orpen inform us regularly that the world she moves through is 'beautiful', but there’s so little specific texture that it could be anywhere. It’s a shame, because the force of a post-apocalyptic novel lies largely in how vividly it evokes the things we have to lose ... Although Last Ones Left Alive courts comparison with Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, it doesn’t deliver that novel’s transcendent sense of art’s absurd persistence. It lacks the extinctionist glee of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Nor is there much new here in terms of zombie lore, although there’s a sequel still to come, and perhaps Davis-Goff has bigger plans to unveil ... Last Ones Left Alive doesn’t bring much new to its genre. Instead, it puts old elements to its own purpose; and, like the skrake, it runs compellingly enough to an irresistible internal logic of violence.
...[an] enjoyable debut novel ... A recent New Yorker article by Laura Miller noted how feminist dystopian narratives are enjoying a boom ... Davis-Goff may have read none of these works but her novel has certainly tapped into the prevailing zeitgeist as there are elements of all of them in this Irish dystopia ... The conclusion is so open-ended that you wonder if a sequel is planned. There are certainly possibilities for a film or TV series with Orpen as the hero. A kind of Dirty Harriet, or Mad Maxine, for the apocalypse.
The book is strongest when constructing its characters, especially Orpen, whose Irish-lilted prose conveys her voice with total authenticity. Even readers who are averse to post-apocalyptic or monster fiction are likely to be charmed by her. The skrakes themselves are rarely seen and not particularly ingenious (for the most part, they’re your basic fast zombies). But it really doesn’t matter, as the stellar character work and rapid pacing will be enough to hook readers.
... squarely in the popular zombie genre. It is also beautifully written, with sentences that have the characteristic lilt of her homeland. The book is very, very Irish, from the characters’ names to the emerald-isle green of the post-industrial landscape, to the mix of sentiment and grit ... Davis-Goff builds considerable suspense with a narrative that alternates between this strange-but-idyllic past and the taut, shrake-threatened present ... The aspect of the book that does not work for me, however, is Orpen’s growing physical attraction to the man, Cillian. Yes, she’s lonely and naïve and hormonally vulnerable, yet this quasi-romance seems to me too opposed to her training, too sentimental, too convenient ... doesn’t break new ground in the zombie apocalypse genre. Even someone like me, who loves a good dystopia but isn’t particularly conversant with the vamp/zombie universe, finds major echoes of other novels, TV series and films in this book. And I wish Davis-Goff wasn’t so vague about why and how the world got this way. I kept waiting for some real backstory on the apocalypse, but it doesn’t arrive ... Davis-Goff’s action scenes are consistently cinematic, visceral, thrilling.
Davis-Goff makes several astute and sympathetic choices that push against the traditional post-apocalypse narrative. The flashbacks to Orpen’s childhood are not only thankfully free of abuse, she is also not exposed to a hard-scrabble, subsistence existence, surrounded by people who couldn’t care less if she lived or died ... I also can’t recall ever reading a post-apocalypse novel (zombies or otherwise) that has such an intimate and sensitive regard for the natural world ... This is a zombie apocalypse I’d be happy to revisit.
Davis-Goff writes language evocative of melancholy longing in a landscape both beautiful and brutal, and she's created the distinctive voice of a first-person narrator who is both confident in her abilities and filled with fear and grief. The lone male character, however, flattens the female characters and does not seem necessary. With a bleak setting, waves of action, and immersive worldbuilding, Davis-Goff’s debut successfully blends horror, lyrical prose, and feminist themes.
