Better World

by Sarah Langan

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

A cunning, outside-the-box satirical thriller about a family’s odyssey into an exclusive enclave for the wealthy that might not be as ideal as it seems.

You’ll be safe here. That’s what the tour guide tells the Farmer-Bowens when they visit Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town with clean air, pantries that never go empty, and blue-ribbon schools. On a very trial basis, the company offers to hire Linda Farmer’s hus­band, Russell, a numbers genius, and relocate her whole family to this bucolic paradise for the .0001 percent. Though Linda will have to sacrifice her medical career back home, the family jumps at the opportunity. They’d be crazy not to take it. With the outside world falling apart, this might be the Farmer-Bowens’ last chance.

But fitting in takes work. The pampered locals distrust outsiders, snubbing Linda, Russell, and their teen twins. And the residents fervently adhere to a group of customs and beliefs called Hollow...but what exactly is Hollow?

It’s Linda who brokers acceptance, by volunteering her medical skills to the most influential people in town through their pet charity, ActHollow. In the months afterward, everything seems fine. Sure, Russell starts hyper­ventilating through a paper bag in the middle of the night, and the kids have become secretive, but living in Plymouth Valley is worth sacrificing their family’s closeness, isn’t it? At least they’ll survive. The trouble is, the locals never say what they think. They seem scared. And Hollow’s ominous culminating event, the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, is coming.

Linda is warned by her husband and her powerful new friends to stop asking questions. But the more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. Should the Farmer-Bowens be fighting to stay, or fighting to get out?

Sarah Langan’s latest novel, A Better World, is gleefully ruthless in its dissection of wealth, power, and privilege, timely in its depiction of a self-destructing world—and it is a prescient warning to us all.

Release date: April 9, 2024

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

The Sinking Ship

The Sinking Ship

“Some people aren’t suited. It’s nothing personal,” Jack Lust said. “They’re simply a wrong fit.”

This guy was a clown. The creepy kind. Linda Farmer didn’t like him, but she smiled at him because she had to.

“For instance,” Jack said. He enunciated every syllable like a disappointed preschool teacher. “Character is paramount. When we hire people who are going to live in our town, mix with our top-level executives, become top level, we need to know they’ll behave.”

Linda nodded as if to say: We have character! We ooze character!

“You’ll have no cause for concern with us,” Linda’s husband, Russell, said. They were sitting together on the sunken couch, looking up at Jack Lust in the high wingback chair like a couple of kids who’d been caught doing something bad.

“Our community is small and like minded. We prefer collaborative types. It’s counterintuitive: to get to this place that you’re at today, an interview for a coveted company job in a jewel like Plymouth Valley, you must outshine all your competition,” Jack said. His bespoke black suit hugged his bony body like shrink-wrap. Linda pegged him at a vim and vigorous seventy-five years old. Cosmetic surgery, healthy living, clean air—company town people kept it tight. Nobody in their seventies looked this good on the outside.

Jack was accompanied by a small entourage of likewise elegant men, none of whom he’d introduced. Two appeared to be taking notes and two were security, waiting outside the Farmer-Bowens’ apartment door. Linda hadn’t checked—this had all moved too fast—but she suspected that the leather straps across their chests held pregnant holsters.

“But once you’re in Plymouth Valley, you must be a team player,” Jack said. His primness, his perfect posture and absence of expression, vibed to her like contained rage. This was a huge leap in all logic—it definitely wasn’t true—but he reminded Linda of one of those guys you hear about on the news streamies, who murder people in weird, excessively neat ways. They lure the random unhoused into their lairs, then exsanguinate and store their blood in jars on their freezer doors. They sneak incrementally larger arsenic doses into a friend’s tea over months and years, just to watch with secret pleasure as their hair and teeth fall out. But she was thinking this only because she was nervous. This three-piece-suited company shill had a lot of power over her life. Her family needed for Russell to land this job. My God, they needed this job.

“Your record is the strongest I’ve seen in a decade. You must have worked night and day to get to this place. Am I correct?” Jack asked.

“Yes,” Russell agreed. He was nervous, trying too hard. She didn’t blame him. “I had days off, but I didn’t take them. My inbox was always too full.”

“The next step is to bring you to Plymouth Valley to interview with our science department. This is a rare opportunity. We almost never open our doors to outsiders. Even when we outsource, it’s typically through other company towns.”

“I’m so honored,” Russell said.

“It is an honor. But it’s an honor you’ve earned,” Jack said.

Linda grinned at the compliment despite its smugness. “What’s it like inside a company town?” she asked.

“They’re all different. Plymouth Valley is the best. Very safe. Very happy,” Jack answered. His beady eyes connected with hers. He didn’t smile. She pictured the shining, bright kitchen in his perfect company town house, maybe a severed head or two in the subzero freezer. It was a game now. A tension release that made this interview less horribly momentous. “If you’re lucky, you might see for yourself. If you’re even luckier, you might get to stay. The reason I’m here, that I asked to meet you in particular, Linda, is that these hires can get tricky. Relocating and housing entire families is costly for the company. We avoid it when we can.”

“Totally,” Linda said. She waited for him to say something like: But we’d be glad to have you! The more, the merrier! This didn’t come, so she elaborated. “We’re a very happy family. The twins are practically grown. They’ve never been in trouble. None of us have been in trouble.”

“We know that from the background check,” Jack agreed.

“Thank you…” she said, flustered. Had she and Russell agreed to a background check? They must have.

“What I’d like to impress upon you both is that Plymouth Valley is a privilege. We have many customs. To an outsider, they might seem peculiar. But you’ll understand them with time. The longer you live in Plymouth Valley, the clearer the picture.”

“We’re prepared for anything that comes,” Russell said.

Linda nodded, suppressing a cough. She’d heard that company people thought outsiders carried disease and didn’t want to give anybody the wrong idea, even though this year’s super bloom was hell on her allergies. “We’re easy people. We get along. We can adapt to any culture,” she said. She had no idea whether this was true. They’d only ever lived in Kings.

Jack leaned forward, talked even more slowly. Did he think they were half-wits? Yes, she realized. He did. And it probably wasn’t personal. He likely thought everyone he knew was a half-wit, and that went double for outsiders. “The first year is the hardest. But if you make it in our town, if you’re accepted, you’re set for life.”

“Great,” Linda said.

“Your children will be set for life.”

“We’ll be the luckiest people in the world,” Linda said, smiling big, eyes wide, voice enthusiastic but not flirty. “I’m so glad you’ve come, Mr. Lust, so I have the opportunity to tell you in person. We’re all in. One hundred percent.”

Jack surveyed the apartment for the first time. He’d avoided this before, made a point not to look at all, as if to spare them the shame. Now, he didn’t compliment their framed kid-art hung askew, or the rack over the dining room table, from which she’d hung long spoons that, in moments of whimsy, they all played like an instrument. It wasn’t a nice place to live. The furniture was threadbare, the big screen cracked. Josie’s dirty soccer crap had migrated to the corners of this living room like rats’ nests. Still, you had to admit: their apartment on Bedford Avenue had character. The Farmer-Bowens had character.

“Our predictions show that this part of town will be underwater in ten years,” Jack said.

“That soon?” Linda asked.

Jack nodded. “We’re not worried about that in Plymouth Valley. We’ve thought of everything. We have everything. We think of PV as the last lifeboat.”

“I’d like to emphasize how hard I’ll work to make this happen. To make myself and my family an asset,” Russell said.

“No need to emphasize anything,” Jack said as he stood. He didn’t grunt like most seventysomethings. He was creepily graceful. Exsanguinator, she thought. Heads in a freezer.

“Thanks for your time. Someone will be in touch.”

His entourage preceding him like they’d choreographed this, he was at the door. He shook both their hands, firm and with eye contact, but still didn’t smile.

From their window, Linda and Russell watched the men in tight black suits cross the weed-broken sidewalk and city detritus–sprayed lawn: paper waste, dead tricycles, rusted tires. Jack stepped high and wide like all of it was dogshit.

The black van pulled away.

Linda hacked four wet, pent-up coughs to clear her lungs, then asked, “Does this mean you’re getting a second interview or not getting a second interview?”

This happened in a different but nearly indistinguishable world.

It was the Era of the Great Unwinding. The institutions, laws, and even the bridges and roads that people had come to depend upon were falling apart. Everything got automated, but broken-automated. You called your health insurance to ask why they’d dropped coverage despite cashing your check, and your complaint got fed into a system that took three months to process it. By then you no longer needed the surgery because your appendix had burst. The on-call doc had saved your life, but they’d done so without getting prior approval from said insurance company, which was using that as a reason to deny your claim. You appealed this denial, which took six months. In the meantime the hospital’s collection agency repossessed your car. This was a thing. It happened in banking, hotels, libraries, schools, the IRS, and every other bureaucratic system. Some version of it happened to everyone.

The weather stopped making sense. Fires and storms raged. Blackouts rolled through the country like waves at a Kings’ Stadium Dodger game. A lot of people stopped making sense, too. They were angry and mad and sad all the time. They were indignant over all they’d lost. They were indignant over what they’d never had. In the absence of knowing how to fix any of what had gone wrong, anger spread like a virus, building from one person to the next. Its expression was a delicious release that felt like action.

This unwinding had been happening for decades, accelerating with every passing year. Then a hydrogen bomb accidentally detonated in the Middle East. For two days all over the globe, smoke blocked the sun. The anger went still. Everything went still.

But humanity is resilient. It recovered from this nearly fatal wound, and it persisted, even as it carried its pain with it. The anger returned. The sound returned. The light returned. People ventured out again, resuming the same arguments they’d been having, only the tone was one octave more panicked.

No one could say whether or how things would get better. They wanted to believe that they would. But the organism, the human condition, was sick. There arose no healer to guide them. No strong, honest Prometheus. Alone, they saw no obvious path to health.

Linda Farmer had been a part-time pediatrician at a free clinic for almost fifteen years. Russell Bowen had been a science adviser with the regulatory department at the EPA. They’d lived in the same Kings apartment all that time, hoping to save up money to move to one of the gated communities over the bridge in Jersey, but never managing it.

Mostly, heads down, they stayed positive. The world was falling apart, but they were okay. They had a home, they loved their kids and one another, and their work had value.

Their marriage was typical, in that it was unlike any other marriage and utterly idiosyncratic. She talked when she was happy, and also sang, and maintained ongoing monologues with herself when alone. He talked when nervous but was otherwise laconic. She felt things deeply and expressed those emotions. He held his feelings so close he often wasn’t aware that he had any. For instance, if asked a simple question like “Did you like your father when you were growing up?” Linda would have beamed happily and said she’d loved him very much, then described all the good memories she had about him and a few bad ones, too. There were plenty of bad ones. Russell would have looked at the person who’d asked, thought for a moment, and replied with sincerity: “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it,” and been very happy once the subject was changed.

Opposites attract. Linda and Russell complemented one another, each fulfilling a need. And then the kids came along, and life happened faster. They spent less time together. Their differences became a problem.

The years accumulated small crimes between them—words spoken in anger, dismissive behavior, rolled eyes. Sometimes, Linda picked fights. After long, exhausting days at the office, where he was treated badly, Russell didn’t have it in him to fight back, and ignored her. This made her angrier. She teased in a mean way to get his attention. (You’re awkward, nerdy. And once, during a very hot argument that she still regretted: You’re weak.) He retreated deeper. Days later, licking their wounds, needing the house to function, the food to be cooked, the bank statements to stay black, and the kids to feel safe in an unsafe world, they came together. They still loved one another, after all. This love was apparent and deep. So, they pretended the fights had never happened. They left resentments behind them, like a dirty river.

Then Black Friday came.

The news streamies were clever for once, likening Congress to a mad King Solomon, who’d made good on a bad promise and cut the baby in half, rendering both parts useless. The federal government slashed more than a million jobs.

Russell showed up to work and found his entire department weeping like mourners at an Irish funeral. At his desk, he found a box, his name misspelled in Sharpie: Bussel Rowen. No severance. No unemployment. No nothing.

In the face of such an emergency, they put aside their resentments and got along better than they had in years. They were still a team. They were the Farmer-Bowens.

Six months after Black Friday, they were sitting at the dining room table beneath the hanging spoons, itemizing unpaid bills on a yellow legal pad. It had been weeks since their “pre-interview” with Jack Lust, and despite Russell’s many follow-ups, they’d heard nothing.

“We could sell my engagement ring,” Linda said.

“I looked it up already,” Russell admitted. “Even the good places won’t pay more than a few hundred dollars for a half-carat diamond.”

“Oh,” she said, twisting the diamond around her finger, imagining him calling pawn shops, which should not have felt like a betrayal, but nonetheless did. “I talked to Fielding about more hours. She said next month I can do seven days a week, which’ll give me overtime. But it’s only temporary. The clinic can’t really afford overtime.”

“How much is that?” Russell asked. His voice was flat, his movements slow. He’d tried to use his time effectively, sending résumés, making calls, cleaning the house, engaging the kids for the first time since… ever? But he’d lost weight since Black Friday, his button-down shirt hanging off scarecrow shoulders. Without work, there was a hole in him.

“Hmm… an extra two grand next month, but then back to my regular salary—four grand a month. Plus, we’ll all need to be on my health care, so that’ll take us back down to… twenty-five hundred?”

Dutifully, methodically, Russell wrote this out with his mechanical pencil.

“The Jam?” he asked.

With all the trains down from so much flooding, the Jam was their only way out of the city. More practically, a car is a kind of house, with four walls and a roof. You can live in a car.

“Naw,” she said. “It’s worth more to us than the cash.”

“College fund?”

“We’ll get killed on the taxes if we cash that in,” Linda said, trying hard to greet this logically. But more than her ring, or her winter coat, or even her hair, she loved that college fund. It represented every ice-cream cone never bought, every vacation never taken. It meant they’d done at least one thing right.

“Forty percent penalty. It’d be a huge waste,” Russell agreed. Then again, that money might float them. The Legal Aid lawyer had told them not to waste another dime on rent—just wait for the eviction. Then use this college fund to rent something smaller and deeper into the messy part of town. But what then? That money would run out, too, eventually.

People were dropping out all over this city. One day, they were your coworker or neighbor or that harried parent at drop-off with the crazy hair. The next, they were squatting in abandoned buildings. They were the disappeared.

She’d been denying it for a while now, but the inexorable weight of it hit her right then: her family might become the disappeared.

“Russell,” she said, her voice cracking. She was trying not to cry, but it was happening. He didn’t react right away, and she knew it was because this was too much for him. He felt too bad about how things had turned out.

“Don’t mind me. Ignore me,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said, soft. “Let’s just get through this.”

That was when his device rang. Instead of an area code, the screen blinked a steady stream of rolling names. A scam, she assumed. Another grifter offering water rights in Siberia or sham iodine pills for radiation. Russell answered it anyway, probably for the distraction.

“Yes, this is Russell Bowen,” he said. His spine perked, his voice coming to life. “That’s right. I met with Jack Lust… Really? That’s great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That’s great.”

As he talked, his eyes watered. He circled college fund instead of crossing it out, then made a sunshine of exclamation points all around it, and she felt a great and gruesome sympathy for him, for all of them, for the whole messed-up, unwinding world.

BetterWorld was one of the smaller multinationals, known mostly for a polymer called Omnium, whose main ingredient was recycled plastic. Hailed as a miracle product, Omnium was used for things like rope, clothing, bags, packaging, fabric, upholstery, machine parts, and even ship sails.

It was biodegradable in the presence of a GRAS-rated (Generally Recognized As Safe) solvent called GREEN. You applied GREEN at home, in your bathtub, and your fabric turned into a thin green slurry that ran right down the drain, or you deposited your Omnium at local collection sites, where it was taken to special waste facilities, and the solvent was applied there. GRAS-rated products were the “natural flavors” you might find in a bag of chips, or the thickening agent in your fake milk. In other words, they were so safe you could eat them.

Quickly after BetterWorld’s founding, Omnium replaced plastic as the most popular global synthetic. BetterWorld couldn’t make enough of the stuff, opening mills across the globe. All that plastic in the oceans shrank. Dolphins, whales, and sea turtles—the ones that could tolerate the acidity—lived to swim another day. The company prospered, extending its reach into pharmaceuticals, banking, construction, and mining.

Though in recent years sentiment had turned against the big corporations, whom protesters accused of resource hoarding, BetterWorld was spared the worst publicity hits. They paid the highest wages to contract workers, contributed to charity, and had literally cleaned the planet. Or they’d done their part cleaning the planet. The planet needed significantly more tidying to sustain life over the next few generations.

Plymouth Valley was BetterWorld’s crown jewel. Located along a distributary of the Missouri River, it was established as the site of the first Omnium mill. Though that mill had closed in favor of larger-capacity factories across the globe, the town was reconceived as the seat of operations, where BW’s top executives lived.

Over the course of Russell’s interview process, Linda read everything she could find about Plymouth Valley. There wasn’t much. High walls protected its residents from crime. A filter called the Bell Jar cleaned its air. Their mascot was something called a caladrius, a bird indigenous to the area whose cartoon likeness BetterWorld used as its emblem. Their local culture was called Hollow. Like most company towns, its architects had built a subterranean survivor shelter.

In his old job, Russell had reviewed the safety and efficacy of polymer-based products. Jack Lust was interested in hiring him as a science adviser in BW’s Plymouth Valley office. He would follow Omnium from creation to disposal, read and initiate studies, and testify on his findings.

With unemployment hovering around 25 percent, people all over the world were trying to get into company towns—places with laws and order and guaranteed work. Places where you could go to the grocery store and exchange pleasantries without getting shot by a stray bullet. But like everything else, even company towns were shrinking. Access to outsiders was practically impossible. Unless you were born to the privilege, you had to be exceptional. A genius, even. The residents weren’t the 1 percent. They weren’t the .01 percent. They were the .000001 percent.

After that phone call, BetterWorld’s search committee flew Russell out to Plymouth Valley. He stayed three days. Linda spent the time acting falsely cheerful and sometimes genuinely cheerful: Dear God, what if he got this thing?

“Well?” she asked when he called on his flight back home.

While Russell spent the day at the library, studying for his final interview, she prepped the kids.

“We’re flying out in two days,” she explained. “They want to meet the family. No cussing. No rudeness. No interrupting. I need you to be on your best behavior.”

“What the fuck?” fifteen-year-old Josie asked. To correct for her own childhood, in which the people around her had nourished their secrets like beloved lap dogs, Linda had always encouraged open discussion. Lately, as it pertained to Josie, she was starting to think she’d overcorrected.

“If your dad gets this, we’re moving,” Linda said.

“I’m not moving,” Josie said. “I’m the only sophomore starting center forward in Brilliant Minds’ history.”

Linda explained the situation in plain terms: there weren’t any other jobs.

For Hip, who was neither a good student at Brilliant Minds Prep (a prep school only in name), nor a big man on campus, reality clicked right away. Either the Farmer-Bowens moved up to Plymouth Valley, or they moved down and out, to someplace much worse. He nodded. Behind his glasses, his eyes were wet.

“I don’t get it. You hate company towns. You said they’re for uptight assholes,” Josie said.

“That’s because I didn’t think we’d ever get invited into one,” she answered. “Now, I think they’re great.”

“What about my team? Our apartment? Why can’t you get a job, Mom?”

“I tried,” Linda explained. “Most of what I do’s been automated. The work’s either in free clinics, where the pay isn’t enough to support our rent, or with really rich people as a private doctor, and I don’t have those connections, Josie.”

Josie spent the afternoon kicking a soccer ball against the brick-walled back of their building. Feverish—that allergic cough had bloomed into a bronchial infection—Linda cleaned the kitchen, mopped the floor, disregarded the bills piled on the counter. She made a snack for Hip, who had food anxiety bordering on anorexia. He liked lentils and he liked tomatoes and sometimes he picked at brown rice. She left the plate on the table as a hopeful temptation. God bless this kid, he ate every bite, then told her to sit down—take a load off, Mom—just to make things easy.

Hours later, Josie returned through the back door, the bib under her armpits and around her neck sweat-drenched. Russ finished his research. Hip came out from his room. Having arrived from separate places, they all four sat at the supper table. In poker terms, this job, this potential move, was a Big Blind. They had no idea what was coming. But they were rational people. They understood that this chance was their best option.

They caught the BetterWorld private jet at the airfield in Ronkonkoma, then zoomed over the congested tri-state with its patched, sea-broken roads, its kudzu and mold creep. They flew over the Great Lakes, and then the plains of Iowa. The closer they got to Plymouth Valley, the more the country flattened and spread like pulled dough. The land turned brown. Houses were dilapidated. Rusted tractors and combines perched silently along desiccated grain fields.

“Jesus, it’s Ozymandias out here. I had no idea it was so bad. How are they even growing corn and wheat?” Linda asked.

“Wait,” Russell told her.

From a plane’s-eye view, they passed Plymouth Valley’s border wall. A lush oasis emerged. The Omnium River wasn’t the dirty Hudson of her childhood. It was blue. As they descended, she saw solar-powered cars cruising paved roads. Hedges stemmed long driveways that bloomed into outsized houses, all lined in neat rows.

“They’ve got a pipeline to the big aquifer. The Ogallala,” he said. “The corn farms were about ten years from depleting the whole thing, so BetterWorld bought them out. I get the argument against company towns like this, but it’s not really resource-hoarding if everybody else is resource-destroying.”

Upon landing, Russell kissed her quickly, waved to the kids, and joined the search committee to convene with the BetterWorld board of directors for a daylong gauntlet. Zach Greene, one of Jack Lust’s many assistants, introduced himself.

“Color me lucky!” Zach said. Like Jack, he put weight on every syllable, enunciating all his letters. They all talked like this, she would later learn. It was the PV accent. “I’m PV’s resident tour guide and I get to spend the day with you fine people. Whatever you do, please do not think of this like an interview. It’s just for fun!” Then he did prayer hands at them, his fingers bisecting his curlicued goatee. “Please have fun!”

Fun?

Like the one Jack had worn, Zach’s suit was skintight. But instead of black, it was bright yellow and pink, and styled with zippers like a tracksuit. Unlike the Omnium fabric back home, which people tended to toss after a season, his was lined and double stitched.

As they rode in the back of Zach’s giant white SUV, past the airfield and south along the self-sustaining farm and the field of wind turbines, everything seemed extra crisp, like kids’ drawings that have been outlined in metallic.

They passed a park with a wide swath of green ahead of a playground. Colorful maypoles lined its roadside. Grosgrain ribbons hung down, their edges grazing the ground. These encompassed every color, including black.

“You’ve heard of Hollow?” Zach asked.

“A little,” Linda said. The air was so clean that she could feel the swelling in her bronchi and sinuses go down: a literal loosening in her chest and back, a squeak under each cheekbone. It felt so good. “It’s the culture here? There’s not much online.”

“There wouldn’t be anything. You’ve probably already figured out we keep our business private. This place is the repository for BetterWorld R&D. Lots of corporate secrets. We’re a satellite no-fly zone, and we store everything important in analog,” Zach said. “But you have it right. Hollow’s a set of customs based on gratitude. Some outsiders think it’s a religion, but it’s not. We’re secular. We just enjoy tradition. We’ve got four local festivals. You just missed Beltane—that’s what those maypoles are about. It’s terrific fun. Lots of competitions. Lots of winners and losers. The winner becomes the annual Beltane King. It’s been Keith Parson every year for the last fifteen. The man’s a legend. So strong! If you move here, you’ll get to see his crowning in September.”

“I’d love that. We all would, wouldn’t we?”

“Yes!” both kids gamely agreed.

The ride was smooth—no potholes, no jerking electric power from chewed-up converters. When they got to the residential section, she noticed dog shelters