Review: We Burned So Bright - T.J. Klune

Genre: Sci-fi Novella

Published: Tor Books & Pan MacMillan International, May 2026 My Rating: 3/5 stars

“You have a choice. You get to choose who you love. No matter what happens next, no one can take that away from you.”

After a yearslong streak of feel-good queer novels, T.J. Klune is switching things up with his latest release; an apocalyptic novella in which we follow an elderly queer couple on a roadtrip across America, in the final days before the earth will be swallowed by a black hole. It’s a far more bleak and melancholic read than we’re used to from Klune, and I had such high hopes for it. I had such high hopes for this. I love a small but mighty novella, I’m a sucker for the introspective melancholic-apocalypse tale, and I’ve had a good track-record with Klune so far. And although this was by no means a bad book, I have to say it’s my first true disappointment by the author.

If I had to sum things up in a single line: I feel there was a fantastic short story in here, that was unfortunately stretched out to be novella-length, and in that stretching it lost its strength.

What I liked:

If you’ve read Klune before, you’ll know where his strengths lie, and those are present here in this work just as well. The queer relationship is beautiful (bonus points for featuring two elderly men, who actually feel like they’ve got history together, rather than the next romance-plot of young-lovers). The imagery and descriptions are beautiful and the landscapes are memorable. I was actually surprised by how unique and almost dreamlike the imagery became near the end, as the black hole approaches and affects Earth’s gravity, atmosphere and electromagnetic field.

There’s also a plotline regarding a topic that’s clearly very close to Klune’s hard, which becomes central near that end, but which I can’t name due to spoilers.

The heart of the story is there, but the structure makes it fall apart before it fully gets off the ground (pun fully intended).

Where it fell apart:

Structurally, this is a road-trip novella, where during the first 100-pages or so, each chapter is an encounter with another persona long the way. This person introduces themselves, and then conveniently delivers a monologue for the rest of the chapter, in which they exposit their complete life-story and the way they’re handling the end of the world because of it. The problem is that we don’t learn anything about any of these characters, outside this single monologue in which they info-dump (or more accurately “trauma-dump”) on our protagonists in weighty prose. This makes it incredibly hard to connect to any of the – arguably horribly sad – things that are discussed.

To make things even worse, we don’t know anything about our protagonists at this point either. Rodney and Don are complete blank slates, up until the final chapters where we finally learn their backstory, and why this roadtrip is meaningful to them. Thís part is fantastic and is the very strong short-story hidden in here I mentioned at the start of my review. It’s heartfelt, gut-wrenching and believably sad without becoming sentimental. Unfortunately, this only comes áfter over 100 pages of unnecessary padding.

In contrast, and likely due to the disconnect I felt at this time, the first 75% did feel incredibly sentimental, and many lines that were clearly intended to be deep rang completely hollow to me. I can’t tell you how hard I rolled my eyes at the line

“But no one’s looking at their phones anymore. Not really. It’s like it took the end of the world for people to look up and see each other.”

It’s such a trite and overdone line, delivered with complete sincerity. Not to mention that we literally learnt a few pages ago that there’s no news, cell-service or broadcasting happening anymore due to the black holes effects. OF COURSE people won’t be looking at their phones when they’ve become literal plastic bricks! This isn’t deep!

My final gripe has to do with the black hole itself. Although it makes for some fantastic cinematic moments and visuals at the end, it’s also creates plot holes to match its own gravity wherever it travels. I don’t expect scientific accuracy from a novel like this, but some internal consistency instead of just plot-convenience, would’ve been nice. Again, no spoilers, but if you're really interested, you can check out the spoiler-section included in my Goodreads review here.

In conclusion, this wasn’t bad, and I’m clearly in the minority for not loving and crying over this story. Take my opinion with a hefty pinch of salt and decide for yourself with this one.