A Refuge of Last Resort

Robb Erwin does not ease a reader into A Refuge of Last Resort. He drops Lorelei into a fluorescent corporate nightmare and lets the book announce itself through surveillance, humiliation, bodily discomfort, and the sense that every institution around her has already decided she is expendable. What impressed me early is that the novel’s dystopian pressure does not feel sleek or speculative. It feels grubby, recognizable, and close enough to the present to make Lorelei’s panic carry real weight.

Lorelei is a compelling guide through that world. She is funny in a dry, defensive way, but never glib. Her sensory awareness gives the book one of its strongest formal advantages. She doesn’t simply tell us that Saino-Blatt is rotten; she detects its rot in the air, in sweat, in cologne, in institutional filth, and in the stale emotional residue of every room. I liked the way Erwin uses that gift to make corporate abuse feel physical. The early sections involving restroom surveillance, humiliating office rituals, and the grotesque grocery-store rollout at Freshee’s are sharp, ugly, and memorable.

The novel also improves when it slows down enough to let relationships breathe. Bart Sampson could have remained a comic side character, but he becomes something better: a melancholy bridge between old cooperative ideals and the stripped-down private-equity present. His scenes with Lorelei carry genuine tenderness. Later movements involving Mermaid Cove, anti-trafficking activists, and the overcrowded refugee shelter in Massachusetts give the book moral scope beyond workplace satire, and I admired Erwin’s refusal to treat displaced people as scenery in someone else’s awakening.

What kept the novel from landing harder for me is that it sometimes overexplains itself. Lorelei frequently stops to define concepts, unpack political conditions, or connect the dots for the reader when the narrative has already done enough. The villains can also feel too neatly monstrous, especially when the book is otherwise interested in systemic cruelty rather than isolated bad actors. In those moments, the satire loses some of its sting because it becomes less unsettling than declarative.

Even so, A Refuge of Last Resort has real force. It is overstuffed, occasionally ungainly, and more interested in moral pressure than elegance, but I respected its ambition. Erwin has written a novel that wants to smell the smoke inside the machine rather than admire it from a distance, and Lorelei gives that anger a bruised, human shape.