Thirst by Benjamin Warner
Monday, March 28, 2016 at 8:50AM 
Published by Bloomsbury USA on April 12, 2016
Thirst is not necessarily a post-apocalyptic novel, although it has features in common with one. An undefined ecological crisis has occurred, but not necessarily an apocalypse. Electricity is out. Cars are piling up at intersections where traffic lights have gone dark. The police are not responding. The internet is down. So are all the cellphone networks. No water comes from faucets. The creek is dry.
Ed Gardner takes a walkabout, looking for his wife Laura. He sees kids selling water for $30 a bottle. He meets someone who tells him about a fire on the Potomac. Soon his neighbors are fleeing, hoping that the city will have emergency water supplies or medical assistance that is unavailable in his suburban home. Ed and Laura try to tough it out with another couple, but the stress of dehydration and the need to survive take their toll on the Gardners and the neighbors who await the arrival of first responders.
Thirst is not one of those ghastly prepper/survivalist novels, for which I am grateful. Protagonists don't run around gloating about how superior they are to the rest of the human race because they hoarded water and filled bugout bags with stale chocolate bars and kept their guns well oiled. Rather, Thirst is a novel about a neighborhood that reacts -- not very well -- to a crisis, with a focus on the Gardners. The breakdown of social order, the conflict between the instinct to survive and the desire to help others, is well-illustrated, although I’m not sure the story offers anything that hasn’t been explored many times in post-apocalyptic fiction.
Thirst tells such a convincing story that I ended every reading session by downing a bottle of water. At the same time, I’m a bit disappointed that the cause of the water loss is never made clear. Nor is it clear why help is delayed for so long. Is this just a forgotten neighborhood or is the whole nation experiencing an overwhelming crisis? Apparently Benjamin Warner wanted all of that to be a mystery, but I couldn’t help wondering whether he simply lacked the imagination to concoct a plausible explanation for the scenario he envisioned.
The ending is a bit ambiguous, as are some scenes that could be delusions produced by Ed’s water-deprived mind. Still, Warner’s prose is lively and his descriptions of a rapidly deteriorating society are vivid. I liked Thirst for the quality of the writing, for the characters, and for some memorable scenes. Thirst is, in fact, one of those novels where the whole is less than the sum of its excellent parts. Still, I liked Thirst well enough to recommend it, particularly to readers who are more interested in reactions to a crisis that the cause of the crisis.
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