Boneshaker

Seattle has been walled off for sixteen years. Inside: poisoned air, crumbling buildings, and the rotting dead. Outside: Briar Wilkes, widow of the man responsible for all of it, trying to hold her life together in the shadow of his catastrophe. When her teenage son slips through a crack in the wall looking for the truth about his father, Briar has no choice but to follow him into the ruin. Cherie Priest drops readers into an alternate Civil War-era Pacific Northwest where the stakes are intensely personal even as the world around them has gone spectacularly wrong — and the tension between a mother's love and a city full of horrors carries the whole thing forward.

Priest writes with momentum and atmosphere in roughly equal measure. The divided narrative — mother and son navigating the same destroyed city from different angles — creates a propulsive, almost cinematic structure that keeps pages turning even during quieter moments. Her Seattle feels genuinely inhabited rather than merely described, its gas-choked streets and desperate survivors rendered with gritty specificity. This is steampunk that earns its darkness, grounded in character rather than gadgetry.