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Godrise
Author: Van JensenPage Count: UnknownPublication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL The synopsis for Godrise reads like a fever dream someone scribbled down after three espressos and a half-watched documentary on 19th-century American atrocities—because, let’s be honest, the way this thing’s structured, it’s either a masterclass in controlled chaos or a cautionary tale about how not to outline a novel. The giant. The dam. The Lakota massacre site. The scientist who’s about to poke a sleeping bear with a stick. It’s all there, but the real question is whether Jensen will turn this into something like The Road meets Annihilation—where the existential dread is so thick you could cut it with a rusted blade—or if it’ll just be another corporate dystopia where the real villain is the lack of imagination. The synopsis leans heavily into the "big alien thing looming over a town" premise, which is a trope so well-worn it’s practically a family heirloom. But here’s the thing: the moment you introduce a three-mile-tall corpse as the central metaphor for human hubris, you’ve already set the bar for how this book will either soar or crash. The synopsis doesn’t tell us if the giant is a symbol, a threat, or just a really big prop in a human drama—because that’s the problem with vague setups. It’s like reading a menu where every dish is labeled "Surprise" and the chef is Van Jensen, who, let’s be fair, has a knack for blending cosmic horror with small-town grit (The Hollow Places comes to mind, though that one at least had the decency to be weird). But Godrise? It’s like if The Stand and The Revenant had a baby, and then that baby was raised by a committee of people who really, really love damning rivers. The sheriff, the scientist, the protester—these are all archetypes, but the synopsis doesn’t give us enough to care. Sheriff Blunt sounds like he’s straight out of a John D. MacDonald novel, which is fine if you’re going for that gritty, morally gray cop vibe. But the way the conflict is framed—water shortages, a dam, a massacre site—it’s all too easy to imagine this becoming a thinly veiled allegory for modern infrastructure failures, which is either brilliant or a cop-out, depending on how much Jensen actually does with it. And Sunny Lee? The scientist who’s about to go spelunking in an alien corpse? That’s the kind of setup that either pays off in the most glorious way or devolves into a mess of half-baked theories. The synopsis doesn’t tell us if she’s a hardboiled pragmatist or a wide-eyed idealist, which matters because the contrast between her and the town’s more reactionary elements could be the book’s emotional core—or it could just be a gimmick. But then—the blade. The blade stabbed through the giant. The infection spreading. This is where the synopsis starts to feel like it’s borrowing from The Thing or The X-Files, but without the same level of precision. Is this a literal infection? A metaphor for colonialism? A stand-in for some other existential threat? The vagueness is maddening, but also… intriguing. Because if Jensen pulls this off, it could be the kind of book that lingers in your mind like a half-remembered dream. And if he doesn’t? Well, then we’re left with another book where the real horror isn’t the alien, but the fact that we’ve seen this all before. Yet—and here’s the pivot—I can’t help but wonder if the synopsis is too vague on purpose. Maybe the genius of Godrise is that it’s less about the details and more about the vibe. The way the town is growing, the way the giant is decaying, the way the dam is a metaphor for human greed—it’s all there in the bones, and if Jensen fills it in with the right balance of dread and irony, it could be something special. But then again, if he leans too hard into the "big alien thing" angle, it might just feel like Independence Day with a side of small-town politics. Whatever you say, boss. The baby monitor just lit up like a Christmas tree in July. 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