The Nightjars are onstage at Burning Man, playing what might be their final show, promoting what will certainly be their final album. The grown-up punks and nostalgia-educated indie rockers in the crowd may not know it yet, but Jenny Sweet and her bandmate-turned-husband, Max, are upending the band – and their marriage, and, by consequence, the eccentrically cloistered world of their teenage daughter Neko. Their relationship woes, unbeknownst to them, are about to be temporarily subsumed, first by the disappearance of Neko, and then by an apocalypse-inducing hurricane.
What went wrong between them resurfaces, in that stubborn way the past does, when the waves recede – at least for Neko. We find her 25 years older, still trying to sort out her relationship with her mother, whom she hasn’t seen since that fateful festival set, and figure out her own future. Flipping between Neko and Jenny’s perspectives, Mary Helen Specht strings a lyrical, introspective bridge over the chasm separating our current moment from whatever might come next, buttressed by the existential human questions that stick with us no matter the setting.
In Specht’s watery dystopia, the rock stars’ daughter has become a mudlark, a scavenger selling goods retrieved from the rubble to the government and the wealthy. People still find a use for a cocktail shaker, antique candlesticks, and bowler hats even in a bedraggled society strapped for fresh fruit and antibiotics. Through Neko’s side gig giving tattoos, creatures and items of a world left behind live on in another way, embedded in the bodies of those who remember them. Neko, her partner Iggy, and their apprentices make the most of humans’ sticky love for physical culture, selling salvaged wares on and off the legal market and saving up for an uncertain future. They dream of “the Inside,” a bubbled-off realm where they might once again trust their neighbors and drink sweet tea. Jules and Harriet, their underlings, search for alternatives, too young to remember such a world.
Each of their pasts complicate these future plans as the group travels through different imaginings of postapocalyptic society: escaping the mundane at a raucous house party, climbing into a highly organized treetop civilization, and encountering a secretive underground enclave. As they travel on a potentially foolhardy mission to reunite Neko with a scrap of her mother, the foursome is forced to decide between the sour allure of radicalism and the rotting sweetness of known systems.
At 38, Neko is feeling strapped for time, only two years younger than her mother was when she found out she was pregnant. More sure of herself with an instrument in hand than with an infant, Jenny struggled to feel confident as a mother. When Neko was born, she recalls, “Life became a Kate Bush song, baroque and exquisite and brutal.” With their relationship cut short during a difficult teenage phase, Neko’s guilt about their final days together colors her own path to adulthood and thoughts about motherhood as she deliberates on what commitments and what freedoms matter most to her. The music of both of their lives flits through the novel, tying the mother-daughter duo together and entangling their experiences with longstanding lyrical storytelling traditions.
Mudlark’s ruins feel eerily tangible – not just because of their climate change origins, but because of their enmeshment in arts and culture, the piecemeal way detritus and contrived normalcy coexist, and the intricate human relationships at the heart of the story. Aesthetic preferences and creative eccentricities are more than expressive outlets here; they’re an essential part of humanity and the source of resilience in a United States made foreign.
Dystopia, a shadowy land that’s only a quake, catastrophe, and collapse away, is one of art’s favorite funhouse mirrors and Specht wields it well. Its reflection creates critiques at a distance and drives up the stakes of our existing dilemmas. The author’s characters, each lovably flawed and idealistically caustic, hold recognizable values and struggle with moral decisions that shadow our own labors and loves.
Mudlark
By Mary Helen Specht
Ballantine Books
This article appears in July 24 • 2026.
