Into the Quiet Barren: Pluto City Book 1 by Jon H. Eddy is about December Valence, a young woman who has spent the last twenty years of her life living in Pluto City, where everything seems to be a simulation. Pluto City was created as a refuge for people who had escaped the war in Sun Country. December got a warning from her ex, Malor, that the city was in danger, which made her curious. Her curiosity led her to discover a shady plan of the founders of Pluto City led by Jovis: to reignite a war and militarize the inhabitants of the city. This compelled her to investigate the truth about the city’s origins and her own contribution to the deception. As the foundations of Pluto City started to crumble, with mysterious power outages, December felt conflicted about confronting the choices and sacrifices that had shaped her life over the years.

I was moved by Jon H. Eddy’s storyline—this is the kind of book that stays with me like a half-remembered dream I can’t easily forget. I loved how Eddy built the worlds in this book. Pluto City was like an eerie, artificial shelter with a sense of security and, at the same time, like a prison, while Sun Country looked raw and chaotic, a place where real life cannot be engineered away. I liked December’s personality; her yearning for something real, aside from the messages she got, made her so human and relatable. I loved the small, reflective moments Eddy added, for instance, when December was staring at the flowers and started reminiscing about Sun Country. The characters were well-developed and flowed well with the book’s fantastical nature. I recommend Into the Quiet Barren to readers who enjoy thought-provoking and character-driven fiction that covers themes of identity and the power of memory.

Into the Quiet Barren by Jon H. Eddy is a dystopian mystery set in Pluto City, a digital sanctuary hidden from a raging civil war above. We're with December Valence, a journalist for the city’s only newspaper, who begins to question her reality when mysterious power outages and resurfacing memories reveal her forgotten role in the sanctuary’s creation. As she delves deeper, December discovers the city’s sinister secrets and must confront her own complicity in its existence. With reality and simulation intertwining, she faces an impossible choice: preserve the illusion or risk everything to reveal the truth.

Author Jon H. Eddy has a real talent for atmospheric writing, and you feel like you're there on another planet from the very first moments of this slick and sharp mystery novel. The haunting prose is vividly atmospheric, and there's great pacing and laying out of scenes to match the suspenseful dystopian setting and leave you in a state of constant tension for what may happen next. I also really enjoyed the timing for the central internal mystery of December’s forgotten past, as this connects her to the story more deeply and raises the stakes the more attached we as readers have become to her. There's also a sophisticated level of theming under the surface that most mystery tales don't have, with an examination of identity, memory, and morality that turns out to be relatable, chilling, and thought-provoking. Overall, readers looking for a great mix of tension and character-led storytelling are sure to love Into the Quiet Barren just as much as I did, and I can't wait to read more from this evocative author.