Reviewed by Valerie
TITLE: Until the World Stops
AUTHOR: L.A. Witt
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 248 pages
RELEASE DATE: October 28, 2020
BLURB:
Their plan was perfect…until the world stopped.
After the Navy boots him out, Tristan is screwed. Without an honorable discharge or a college degree, his job prospects are grim. If only he knew a service member who was willing to get married, make Tristan a dependent, and transfer his GI Bill. Such as, say, a former coworker who’s single, gay, and wants his family off his back about his refusal to settle down…and who maybe feels guilty for his role in Tristan losing his career.
Casey has never liked Tristan, but the plan is irresistible. In fact, it’s perfect. Now Tristan has health insurance and a place to live, and he’s going to school. Meanwhile, Casey’s conscience is assuaged, and he’s still sleeping his way through town while his family is none the wiser. The guys stay out of each other’s way, and it’s all good.
Right up until a pandemic locks everything down.
Suddenly it’s just Casey and Tristan…and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. In a time when they’re both desperate for strength, support, and human contact, they find them in the most unexpected place: each other.
But when feelings come into play, is it something real? Or just two lonely men making the best of terrifying times? And how in the world do Casey and Tristan tell the difference?
REVIEW:
Until the World Stops opens in early 2019, with Tristan and Casey in the Navy, stationed at a small base in Maine. The job is not going well for Tristan, who doesn’t mesh well with the military: he’s hot headed, too free with his mouth, and doesn’t like to take orders. Unfortunately, he makes a stupid Facebook post with his unpopular opinions about those in command. Now he’s about to be discharged without the all-important “honorable” on the papers.
Casey, as Tristan’s superior, should’ve dealt with the issue himself, but it went above his head. Now Tristan is going to lose his job – and his benefits including the GI Bill, health insurance, and a place to live. He’s losing everything and won’t be employable without an honorable discharge. So even though they barely manage to tolerate each other, Casey suggests a marriage of convenience because he feels so guilty about Tristan being sacked. With Tristan as his dependent, he can transfer his GI Bill to Tristan so he can go to college, and share his benefits. How Casey benefits is less clear. He says it will get his mom off his back to get married, and it will alleviate his guilt, but a marriage in name only seems awfully drastic.
Now it’s a year later and Casey and Tristan, who loathe each other, are living together as husbands and the pandemic is just beginning to outbreak in the United States. It’s become a cold war in their home. Casey is miserable and very resentful of Tristan for being in this situation. He avoids going home after work. He despises his superiors at work who cost Tristan his job, and his anger is hurting his chances for a promotion. For his part, Tristan is growing increasingly uncomfortable about his complete dependency on Casey.
As COVID-19 concerns increase, the men spend more and more time at home and thus more time together. Stress arising from the unknown nature of the virus eats away at them until they reach a truce and forge a friendship that keeps them sane as they’re increasingly isolated from normal life. Friendship evolves into friends-with-benefits and eventually more. Casey and Tristan have very strong chemistry and the sexy times are so hot.
That’s the part of the book I quite liked, but I have mixed feelings about Until the World Stops. In the author’s note, L.A. Witt states that she debated writing this story because she didn’t want to make light of the pandemic or capitalize on it. Rather, she wanted to write a story incorporating real life, even if it’s ugly. Well, real life is certainly ugly right now. I believe Witt achieved her goal of creating a story reflective of our times and delivering a heavy dose of reality without being exploitive of the pandemic.
The author provides a content warning for COVID-19, but based on the blurb, I expected, perhaps naively, that the focus would be on the forced proximity of roommates needing to spend too much time together while on stay-at-home orders. What I didn’t count on was all the nitty gritty, the part that was too much COVID-19 reality: bare supermarket shelves, PPE shortages, conspiracy theories, masks, media overload, virus deniers, test shortages, unemployment, and sickness. On one hand, it was interesting reading about the early stages of the pandemic, and looking back on a time when so little was known. But it felt like a bit of an info dump with an effort to hit upon every possible aspect of the pandemic. This would be of great interest, perhaps, to someone who wasn’t living through it right now. But we are still living with this pandemic, it’s worse than ever in some areas, and still too raw to read about for many readers. At best, the virus has been annoying and inconvenient; at worst, it’s meant trauma from job loss, interrupted education, illness, hospitalized, and of course death. This book didn’t provide the escapism I seek in fiction.
So those are my two takes on this book. I enjoyed the story outside of the COVID-19 minutiae. Casey and Tristan are likable, albeit underdeveloped, characters once I got to know them better. Neither is without faults and it takes time to warm up to them. These guys abhor each other before they get married and it doesn’t improve once they exchange vows. They eventually reach their happy ending, though. Witt cleverly takes the reader along a parallel journey from ambivalence about Casey and Tristan to rooting for them. With the strong chemistry she develops, it’s easy to become invested in their outcome. This is a well-written book and if you’re ready to read about the pandemic, this might be a good place to start because Witt has written about the difficult topic with sensitivity.
RATING: 
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