One-Line Summary
A survivor of a childhood cult accepts a dream invitation to a luxury island retreat — only to find that paradise still echoes with the ghosts of control.
Opening Impression
How Bad Things Can Get marks a bold departure for Darcy Coates, shifting from haunted mansions to the sunlit horror of memory itself. The novel lures readers with influencer sparkle and serenity before unspooling into psychological dread. Coates writes with precision and empathy, using fear not as spectacle but as anatomy: she wants to know what trauma does to a person who refuses to die. The result is a thriller that hums with menace even in daylight — a study of how our pasts can colonise our futures.
Synopsis
Ruth has spent years trying to outlive her reputation as the only survivor of the Prosper Commune, a cult that ended in mass tragedy. When she wins a coveted invitation to a private “festival” on Prosperity Island — hosted by the magnetic wellness influencer Ash Calder — she sees it as a chance to start over. The resort is immaculate, the guests beautiful, and the schedule curated to perfection. Yet beneath the choreography of yoga, bonfires, and self-improvement lies something disquieting. As Ruth navigates friendships and suspicions among strangers, she begins to sense that freedom may not be what’s on offer — and that healing sometimes demands confrontation rather than escape.
Evaluation
Structure: Coates structures the novel as a slow burn, each day on the island tightening the sense of unreality. Interspersed flashbacks to Ruth’s cult childhood sharpen the psychological focus without disrupting pace. The countdown format keeps tension taut while allowing moments of quiet, painful introspection.
Characterisation: Ruth is one of Coates’s most grounded protagonists — wary, intelligent, shaped by grief but never consumed by it. Ash Calder, with his curated charisma, embodies the seductive cruelty of modern influence. Even minor participants — the loyal assistant, the hesitant guest, the PR fixer — reflect different shades of belief and complicity.
Style & Voice: The prose is lucid and unsparing. Coates favours understatement over spectacle, letting sensory detail — heat, salt, static from phone screens — carry the unease. Dialogue is clipped, charged with what isn’t said. Her control of tone allows dread to rise naturally, like humidity.
Themes: Trauma, performance, and the cult of self-improvement. The story asks whether control disguised as care is still control, and what happens when the pursuit of healing becomes another system of faith. Beneath the thriller frame lies a meditation on survival: not the adrenaline kind, but the emotional act of continuing.
Verdict
How Bad Things Can Get is a rare hybrid — a survival thriller that’s genuinely humane. Coates turns paradise into a pressure cooker and trauma into philosophy, crafting a story that is as beautiful as it is harrowing. By the final page, the island feels like a metaphor for our curated lives: sunlit, performative, and quietly imploding. Thoughtful, tense, and uncomfortably believable, this is one of Coates’s finest achievements — proof that the worst horrors are the ones we package as healing.
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