A Refuge of Last Resort

I wasn’t prepared for how funny A Refuge of Last Resort* could be while being this angry. Robb Erwin drops Lorelei into a near-future Florida where corporate culture, labor exploitation, privatized cruelty, and public breakdown all seem to be feeding one another, then lets her describe the mess with disgust, wit, and hard-earned vigilance. The result is a novel that often feels like satire with a bruise under it.

Lorelei is the book’s great asset. She has hyperosmia, so the world reaches her first through smell: stress pheromones, stale ketchup, sewer gas, cheap cologne, and the whole sickly perfume of a society going rancid. That device could have become a gimmick, but Erwin uses it well. It sharpens her alertness and deepens the book’s obsession with violated boundaries. The early scenes at Saino-Blatt, where even an “all-gender washroom policy” becomes a tool of surveillance, are among the novel’s best because they make humiliation feel systemic.

I also liked the way the novel keeps widening. What starts as a grotesque workplace story grows more ambitious through Lorelei’s connection with Bart Sampson, an aging former food co-op idealist pulled into a private-equity sales fiasco, and later through the CAHT network, Mermaid Cove, and the Pioneer Valley refugee shelter. Erwin is trying to connect corporate predation, foster-care trauma, immigration politics, debt bondage, and social collapse inside one chain of cause and effect. That’s risky, but there are stretches where it genuinely works. Bart in particular brings warmth and sorrow to the book, and I found his scenes with Lorelei some of the most affecting.

What held me back was that Erwin does not always trust his story to make its own case. Lorelei frequently pauses to explain the era’s politics, language, and moral absurdities in big expository slabs, and those passages can flatten the momentum. A few villains are drawn so broadly that they verge on caricature, and some later turns feel less discovered than arranged to support the thesis. This is a book with a lot on its mind, and occasionally it sounds like it knows that a little too well.

Still, I found *A Refuge of Last Resort* vivid, peculiar, and unexpectedly moving. Its sprawl is part of its identity, even when that sprawl works against it. Erwin has written a novel with real bite and real feeling, and Lorelei is the kind of narrator who can carry a reader through a great deal of chaos.