The Bookmonger: A novel approach to The Big One

Published 10:40 pm Wednesday, July 30, 2025

If you’ve heard your fill of weather-related natural disasters on the news recently, how about this for a change of pace: debut novelist Emma Pattee focuses on what we in the Pacific Northwest call The Big One – the major earthquake anticipated by geologists to occur along the Cascadia fault line perhaps as soon as within the next half-century.

“Tilt” is the story of lives turned upside down when a megaquake hits Portland. As readers, we experience the quake and its aftermath firsthand through Annie, who at nine months pregnant is finally getting around to crib-shopping at IKEA. She is receiving lackluster help from a young female customer service rep who is sporting half a shaved head and pink cheetah print acrylic nails.

If the clerk is apathetic, Annie is the perverse obverse. She is swollen, anxious, and bristling with random hostility. She’s already had an argument with her husband that morning before he headed off to work, and she’s still loaded for bear. Exacerbating her mood, the baby is kicking hard inside the womb.

But the sudden jolt outside of her body seems incongruous. Annie looks around.

“At the end of the aisle, in the center of the warehouse, people are paused behind carts. One man drops a rolled-up rug and starts to run towards the exit. I see an older couple stop and look up at the ceiling. Animal fear travels body to body, cell to cell. We all hold our breath at once.”

And that’s when the real rock-and-rolling begins.

There’s nothing like a 9.0 temblor to wrench oneself out of indulgence in petty grievances. Fierce, adrenaline-fueled survival instinct kicks in. Annie is one of the lucky ones, pulled out of the wreckage of the warehouse by none other than the clerk who had been so unhelpful before. But Annie’s purse, phone and keys are lost in the rubble – and anyway, once she emerges into the sunlight, she sees that the entire landscape around her has been significantly disrupted. Roads are jumbled, cars are tumbled, the late summer heat is oppressive, and people are shambling away in a daze.

Annie joins the befuddled throngs, accompanied part of the way by the half-shorn clerk.

With no money, no water, a big belly and aching feet, our pregnant protagonist lumbers across Portland to try to find her husband. Along the way she ruminates about all of the seemingly inconsequential decisions over time that have led to her being here and now, and she addresses this mental chatter to “Bean,” her little yet-to-be born.

She offers up a series of belated bargains to fate: she’ll change for the better if only she can get out of the warehouse … to her husband’s workplace … across the river … back to the apartment.

But in this shattered landscape, there is no return to normalcy.

Author Pattee conjures the aftermath of a megaquake in apocalyptic detail, and Annie’s first-person narrative is by turns tragic, tender, and grotesquely funny. “Tilt” is a tour de force.

The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at bkmonger@nwlink.com