Spendlove, “The Freezer” (Reviewed by Liz Busby)

Review
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Title: The Freezer
Author: Ben Spendlove
Publisher:  By Common Consent Press
Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 368
Binding:  Paperback
ISBN:  978-1948218955
Price: 11.95

Reviewed by Liz Busby for the Association for Mormon Letters

One of my husband’s favorite films is a 2010 Russell Crowe thriller called The Next Three Days. In the movie, Crowe’s wife is convicted of murder with a preponderance of evidence against her; only Crowe’s character, a community college professor, continues to believe in her innocence. After her final legal appeal fails, he stumbles his way to successfully break her out of prison, and they disappear off the grid together to live out the rest of their lives with their young son. Given the middling reviews of the film, it’s certainly not a cinematic classic. However, I believe the reason my husband loves the movie is because of its portrayal of a husband with an unwavering devotion to his wife, a man who values his marital relationship more than his own career, happiness, and even freedom.

Ben Spendlove’s debut novel The Freezer features a similar sort of protagonist, albeit without the extra-legal hijinks of The Next Three Days. In the beginning chapters of the book, aerospace engineer Thane Ryder meets and marries Dawn Smith, a pilot on a space ferry he’s taking to evaluate progress on a spaceship that will hopefully allow a few humans to escape the impending disaster. A rogue planet is destined to collide with Earth in less than a decade, resulting in the total destruction of all human life. Dawn and Thane’s devoted relationship becomes a lifeline of stability in a world that’s being gradually broken down by the specter of doom.

It becomes just as much a lifeline to the reader, pulling us through the otherwise harrowing events of an apocalypse with its passionate description of the goodness of devotion and sacrifice for a family.  I loved the chapter of the novel describing their chaste courtship and the portrayal of waiting for intimacy until marriage as a gift rather than a trial to be endured. The love between Thane and Dawn is not the love of a romance novel that brings self-actualization, but a love that demands more of us than we would demand of ourselves.

As all life on Earth is under an irrevocable death sentence, Thane is shocked when Dawn tells him that she wants to have a child. Spendlove’s portrayal of Thane’s struggle with this decision is an engagement with contemporary concerns of young couples about the morality of bringing children into a world of climate disaster and political brinkmanship. The novel directly rejects the idea that choosing not to have kids might bring more satisfaction than having them. Throughout the book, Spendlove again and again reaffirms the value of the gift of life, even a life cut short by physical frailty or a world-ending apocalypse, for both the child and the parent. Thane, with his adult knowledge of the coming horror, is frequently grounded in the present by his daughter Mandy’s zest for life: “For all the wrong in the world, all the pain, the mistakes, and cruelty, there was still goodness, still opportunity for happy moments, for play and laughter. Wherever there were children, at least” (226). In the end, the book celebrates those who, as it were, whistle in the dark by choosing to give life to the next generation: “Parents have become rare in these final days. And as humanity teeters on the brink of extinction, we need extraordinary people among us to carry on. We need people who will sacrifice for others. We need bravery and love. And we need children” (320).

Although Thayne and Dawn are not Latter-day Saints–they are only vaguely described as Christian–they move to Utah and live in LDS culture, which has a strong influence on the novel. There is an indication that Thane and Dawn attended LDS services with some regularity even without joining, and while Thane is at work, Mandy spends her days being cared for by their LDS next-door neighbor, who acts as a surrogate mother to Mandy when Dawn has to leave to pilot one of the escape ships. Thane also seems to have absorbed the LDS culture of food storage, though perhaps any sensible person would be storing food as the world’s production gradually slows to stop. One of the most moving passages in the book is a remembered Sunday School discussion about emergency preparedness that devolves into an affirmation of the importance of being able to defend their stores from outsiders. One member stands up to the general consensus with a profound statement about the importance of Christian virtues even in apocalyptic circumstances:

“What you need isn’t a solid steel door and a shotgun with plenty of shells. What you need is the faith to welcome them in and give them a feast. … You need the faith to send them away with boxes of your precious stores. Shooting people is never an option, no matter what you see on TV. The only alternative is to send them away hungry. And if we do that, all that carefully hoarded food will sour in our bellies. We’ll eat and not be filled, and drink and still thirst.” (116)

This issue of personal survival vs humane living is returned to over and over as Thane must make increasingly heartbreaking decisions of the kind that post-apocalyptic entertainment forces us to expect. Yet unlike another of my husband’s favorite shows, The Walking Dead, the protagonist never reaches the point where his survival trumps his humanity. When forced to make the most painful decisions, he gives and gives and gives again. Thane’s mantra against the end can be summed up by one line: “All you offer is survival. But I want more. I want to live” (192). Thane’s character is revealed to the reader as we see what the apocalypse does to him as a person.

In fact, I believe it’s this post-apocalyptic setup that allows The Freezer’s most profound theme to be moving rather than saccharine. Because we have been through Thane’s fear, his indecision, his grief, and his agony at all the choices the world has for him to make, his growth towards faith at the end of the novel becomes believable. At the beginning of the novel, Thane relies on Dawn’s belief rather than any of his own. When she leaves the planet, he loses any certainty he had and becomes adrift. Over the course of the plot, we witness experiences that lead to a personal transformation for Thane. Near the end of the book, he offers this perfect elaboration on Alma 32 to describe what has turned him from an agnostic into a believer:

“What we believe is like one of those plants. It’s grown slowly, over time. And I can’t share that belief with you because it’s rooted in our hearts, nourished by our experiences. … I can describe the plant with words, but my words can’t duplicate the plant. It has to grow, like a real bean plant.” (327)

Spendlove perfectly pulls off this gradual growth of belief, forcing the reader to experience Thane’s journey along with him but never assuming the end from the beginning.

I won’t spoil the central fantastical conceit of The Freezer by mentioning the exact circumstances in which Thane must finally exercise his new faith. I will say that I wholeheartedly bought the final resolution of the novel because I felt every cost Thane had to pay along the way. This novel had the exact balance of speculative conceits and real humanity that made it a perfect read for me. Spendlove’s prose is compelling and profound, while never straying into self-indulgence. The values of family devotion and hard-won faith are a perfect antidote to anyone feeling the doom and gloom of the 24-hour news cycle. I can’t wait to start buying copies of The Freezer to pass out to the people around me because its harrowing plot wrenched my heart in all the right places to allow hope to grow in its wake.