MacKenzie Scott’s latest self-published novel, Last Days, struggles with narrative sprawl and editing issues as it attempts to map a fractured future America.
The tension in MacKenzie Scott’s new novel. *Last Days*. isn’t just found in its depiction of a fractured. surveillance-heavy America. It lives in the friction between a sprawling. cinematic vision and a prose style that often feels like an unfinished draft. The book unfolds over a single week. tracking eighteen different characters across a landscape split between the Dakota Membership—a territory obsessed with “augmented evolution. ” genetic editing. and “self-improvement centers”—and the remaining states. known as Still United.
In the Dakota Membership, President Damian Paxton oversees a society where the line between protection and regulation has effectively vanished. Children and adults alike are assessed for “rebelliousness” or “originality,” traits that can land them in state-run facilities. This high-stakes environment serves as the backdrop for Liv Lockhart, an event planner for the Bureau of Rewards for Courage. Living in the shadow of her father. Magnus Lockhart—the leader of a Scientology-like cult called the Church of the Long Tomorrow—Liv navigates the regime to protect her son. Her backstory. defined by her escape from her father’s underground compound at age twelve while he warned her of outside control. mirrors the coercion she now helps facilitate.
Yet, the technical execution of the book frequently undercuts its own ambition. Readers encounter frequent typos and clichés. such as a back seat described as being “quiet as a tomb. ” alongside strained wordplay like “shitspitality” and “President priss.” The structure itself suffers from its breadth; the narrative darts between eighteen perspectives. which occasionally leaves the text feeling destabilized and convoluted. While Scott was once a protégée of Toni Morrison at Princeton. the heavy-handedness in *Last Days* stands in sharp contrast to Morrison’s own disdain for excess. Here. political ideas are often spelled out so explicitly that the reader is left with the sensation of reading both a novel and its own underwhelming summary.
Underlying these issues is the persistent sense that *Last Days* is a movie script masquerading as a book. The pacing is brisk, and the dialogue is optimized for a screen adaptation rather than the page. In one cinematic sequence. Liv drugs a high-ranking official with an Ambien-laced mojito. steals a zip drive. and uses a citrus knife to cut an embedded tracker from her chest. Elsewhere, a Still United operative named Jonah focuses his efforts on training a rat for an explosive mission.
Beyond Liv, the novel populates its world with parents struggling under the same yoke: Gary Handler, Liv’s colleague and lover, works within the government to secure freedom for his family, while the President’s cook, Enrique, endures his station to provide medical care for his daughter.
These personal sacrifices highlight the core contradiction of the novel’s moral universe. Resistance, as Scott illustrates, frequently serves the state it intends to topple. By the final pages, the Bureau of Rewards for Courage is revealed as a front for the resistance. While it succeeds in the “defeat of a dictator. ” the epilogue notes that this victory comes at the cost of the “internment and genetic mutilation of half a million people.” In Scott’s hands. every act of love and subterfuge is caught in a double exposure. leaving behind a story that reaches for epic stakes but remains tangled in its own rough edges.
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