TL;DR: A lean, vicious lake-apocalypse coming of age story where a burned out teen in a kayak tries not to die, physically or morally, while dirt-eating monsters own the land. Great survival texture and gnarly set pieces, a little repetitive on the guilt spiral, but it absolutely kills.

Kayak by Kristal Stittle takes the end of the world and shrinks it down to one kid, one boat, and a whole lot of water. A meteorite impact quietly smuggles something awful into the soil, and within months the land belongs to the “dirt devils,” spiky, intelligent predators that erupt from the ground and shred anything that dares to touch dry earth. Humanity retreats to lakes, islands, docks and floating shacks, clinging to shorelines like mold. In the “Now” timeline, sixteen year old Keith is alone in a too-bright green kayak, sore, half sunburnt, half feral, paddling into unknown channels after the winter house community is destroyed. In the “Then” chapters we watch his life collapse: watching the impact on a livestream, the first Russian monster videos, the power outage, the panicked run to the neighbor’s pool, then the slow-building lake settlement that becomes home long enough to really hurt when it goes to hell.

Stittle has a good feel for the kind of middle class, Canadian-ish cottage country kid Keith is at the start, and for how that kid gets ground down into a survivor. He is not a prepper, not a chosen one, just a comics nerd who likes fantasy series and has a decent dad who builds fancy tables. The book sticks close to him in third person and refuses to expand the camera much beyond what he can see from the waterline. That choice gives Kayak a tight, claustrophobic focus. Even when we finally glimpse the larger operation reclaiming islands with military science and electrified monster traps, it still feels small and human, filtered through a kid who is exhausted, guilty as shit, and convinced he deserves whatever punishment is coming.

The plot is simple and sharp. In the present, Keith is trying to survive alone on the lake, scavenging cottages, dodging dirt devils that prowl the shore, and trying not to fall apart in his stupid little boat. In the past, we see how the monsters spread from Russia and Brazil to everywhere, how his neighborhood flees to the lake, how a winter house community forms on an island under the gruff leadership of Mr Steel and the practical guidance of older survivors like Jan. Those chapters do the heavy lifting of building the rules: monsters control land when there is bare dirt, people are safest on water, rain and deep snow change the balance and let humans raid. Event by event, tragedy by tragedy, you feel how they whittle down numbers and hope until Keith finally makes a catastrophic mistake that gets a lot of people killed, and he bails, literally, in that kayak.

The texture of survival is captivating. Stittle is weirdly good at describing gear without turning it into a manual. The opening inventory of the kayak, paddle, lifejacket and emergency bucket is both functional and quietly terrifying, because you know that thin layer of plastic is all that sits between Keith and a monster that can chew through rock. The book is full of these tactile little problems: how to pee without turning your back on the shore, how far away from a dock you need to float to feel safe, how cold you get after hours in wet clothes, how long you can go on shit sleep and lakewater. When the dirt devils do show up on page, they are nasty in a restrained way. The white irises, the cross-shaped pupils, the way they study humans rather than just charging in, all of that makes them feel properly alien without a huge lore dump.

This is very readable, very Tenebrous, and just voicey enough to keep you locked in. The prose is clean, mostly invisible, with occasional sharp images that slice through: snow as a protective blanket trapping monsters underground, a lake turning into a highway of canoes and paddleboats once a big safe zone is reclaimed, a kid screaming into empty water because there is literally no one left to answer. Dialogue feels natural, especially in the early school scenes where everyone is joking about Russian hoaxes right before the world goes to shit. The alternating “Now” and “Then” chapters are handled well, each chunk usually ending on a small hook that makes you want to see both what happens next and how the hell they got here. If there is a downside, it is that Keith’s internal guilt loop gets a bit repetitive in the back half. We absolutely get that he feels like a coward. Sometimes the book hammers that feeling one or two times more than it needs to.

Underneath the monsters and the kayaks, this is a story about guilt, responsibility, and the thin line between self preservation and abandonment. The dirt devils are terrifying, but the thing that really curdles in your gut is the moment Keith realizes he did what he had been told to do, survived exactly the way adults taught him, and still feels like he fucked up beyond repair. That theme continues to be pushed: ice that melts too soon, exposing people caught mid plan; snowmobiles that expand their reach but also expand the radius of risk; a monster that may or may not be clever enough to stalk specific humans. By the time Keith meets May in her paddleboat and sees the island network with electrified monster traps and judges and something like a future, the impact is complicated. There is hope, sure, but also the sick understanding that any rebuilt society is going to need scapegoats, stories about blame, and someone like Keith to stand there and say, yeah, I did this, now what.

Kayak sits comfortably beside other tight, one character survival nightmares. Think Bird Box energy, but filtered through Canadian cottage country and stripped of spectacle in favor of wet clothes, busted shoulders, and a kid who cannot forgive himself. It is not the flashiest end of the world book out there, but it is one that sticks like lake mud.

Strong, well crafted, and distinctive enough that whenever you see a lone kayak on a quiet lake, you are going to think of this shit and feel just a little less safe on shore.

Kayak by Kristal Stittle,
published February 17, 2026 by Tenebrous Press.