Jo Salazar’s If We Survive the Night is apocalyptic YA horror built around one of the most compelling antiheroes the genre has produced in years. Quinn, sixteen, ASPD-diagnosed, and done with the systems that have failed her since childhood, finds herself at the start of the zombie apocalypse inside a residential treatment centre. What follows is a fast, psychologically precise survival story that asks hard questions about who gets written off as dangerous, who gets called a hero, and what those labels are actually worth when civilisation ends. Sharpened by Salazar’s social work background and driven by a protagonist you can’t look away from, this is feminist horror fiction doing exactly what the best of the genre does: using monsters as a mirror.
