Outwardly, Wrecks is not a horror novel in the way Lamb is, but it shares that book’s grim sense of environmental collapse. It is set in a near-future London where the heat is stifling, endless, all-encompassing...

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Then there’s the weather. Hill is an intensely physical writer. His characters are firmly embed­ded in and shaped by their environment. With Lamb, it’s the spread of an invasive mould that infiltrates every nook and cranny, including the human body. With Wrecks, it’s the oppressive, stifling atmosphere caused by a heat dome cov­ering London: “the lawn… tinder-dry, the patio flags untouchable, the very concept of dew a strange fantasy.” Where I am, it’s winter, and yet I still felt the sweat collecting in the folds of Jim’s flesh, “mak[ing] him itch, weld[ing] his scrotum to his thighs.” (A perk of the Courser job is the van’s excellent air conditioning.)

I’d say that Hill’s depiction of the London heat dome and the wildfires ravaging the Peak Dis­trict is prescient given this summer’s firestorms across Europe (especially Spain), but really Hill is writing about what we’re all seeing, what so many of us are experiencing. And that sense of inevitability, that impression that we’ve lost our grip on the future as climate change worsens, plays into the story’s broader themes as Jim in­exorably loses agency. He is like Teddy and Eric from earlier in the novel, unable to correct course or avoid the impending crash. Bleak, I know. But, similar to M. John Harrison’s astonishing novel The End of Everything, which has a comparably nightmarish, dislocated atmosphere, Wrecks offers the barest hint of a happy ending, of find­ing closure amongst all the ruin and wreckage.