[2.5 stars] [I read a physical copy of the 2025 re-release]

I’ll start out by saying that my knowledge of SCP stuff is very limited. I’ve read one or two wiki articles and seen a few posts on IG about it all, but that’s about as far in as I’ve gotten (though I have always found the idea to be pretty interesting). That being said, I really didn’t go into this book with strong opinions one way or another.

Okay, so there is this secret global agency based around “Unknowns” (or Antimemetic beings), entities that affect human perception and memories. Many are hostile, some are not. We primarily follow Marie Quinn, the head of her branch of the organization during a time of mounting aggression from the Unknowns as the organization continuously struggles to fight what they can’t truly perceive.

We start with a series of rapid-fire, almost episodic chapters of various encounters with Unknowns. It was a bit disjointed at first but I warmed up to it quickly (I also thought that these were the strongest chapters of the book). Just several short chapters of strange encounters to quickly show us what we are dealing with without needing to make the reader sit through pages of encyclopedic explanation. During these initial chapters, the groundwork of the book’s greater plot and the rising threat level are being laid in the background and eventually the book takes on more of a standard novel format. QNTM has a nice writing style and a dry sense of humor that works quite well with the story (it reminded me of Hitchhiker’s Guide, but much more sparse in its comedic moments- this is not a comedy for the record).

A lot of times this book just felt like it took the lamest path possible. Okay, so the unknowns are these entities that mess with human perception and memories to the point where they could be right next to you and you wouldn't know it but throughout the story they usually have a physical form/take over a human’s physical form. So most of the time they just got confronted and shot. The times where we break from this are so interesting (the Gage chapter early on and how it was defeated was perfect) but way too often it's just some monster of the week baddie who just gets shot. The book offers an explanation that we don’t know if these entities ever actually die but it never really plays with this idea in depth so it’s not enough to save it.

Another other overall issue I have with this book is the lackluster characters. This book is definitely more interested in its worldbuilding and the scenarios than the characters themselves, but the characters are just very nonexistent. Marie Quinn is a workaholic, okay… and so is every single other character we meet who is involved with the Organization. Adam is the exception to this - and I did enjoy what we saw of his character and how he broke the mold a bit - but honestly everyone else all blended together. Marie gets some credit for being a workaholic, extremely competent, middle-aged woman which I don’t see nearly as often as I should in literature, but the fast pace of the story and the fact that we meet her so far into her career left her no room to grow or develop beyond these basic traits.

Building off the characters, as the story goes on it becomes more and more clear that Marie and Adam’s relationship is the heart of the story and that we as readers are supposed to be deeply touched by the tragedy of it. The thing is, we get to see them interact as husband and wife a single time before everything happens. So like, why would I care? The book just tells us that they are married and that’s enough I guess. This basic established relationship would be perfectly fine if it weren’t such a large part of the book’s emotional core and climax, but when it’s treated as such a big a deal as it is I am just left wondering where I was supposed to start caring about their relationship with one another.

I found the last third of this book to be horrendous. A genuine chore to finish. Without spoilers: the book trades in a genuinely interesting exploration of a bureaucratic secret global organization to follow a man walking around an empty city by himself while being scared and not interacting with anything or one. Cool. Nothing interesting was done with the setting or solitude. Again, the scary, unknowable entities are devolved into just being giant skyscraper-sized spiders with nothing interesting going on with them. The momentum comes to a complete halt for several chapters. I didn’t care about our character enough to care, I didn’t think that the setting or entities were interesting enough to stay invested, and I still don’t understand why it all happened (suddenly there's some livestreamer controlling people en masse? I get that he was possessed by the big bad Unknown but it was such an abrupt plot point that I had trouble following). I also had trouble following the ending itself, but I’ll admit that I had checked out by that point so that may not have been the book’s fault. I hate to criticize a book based on me not “getting” it, but I really tried and genuinely found so much of the last 25% extremely hard to follow beyond the absolute basics.

The book did some really interesting things (especially in the great first handful of chapters) but ultimately fell flat. I just don’t think that there is anything special about it. Fittingly, I don’t think I’ll remember much of this book after I post this review.