A haunting, provocative novel, YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS is a fictional autobiography in an alternate 20th century that chronicles one woman’s unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save.
YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS
by Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson
HarperCollins, November 2021
Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family. Devastated by grief and loneliness, she emotionally exiles herself, avoiding relationships or allegiances, and throws herself into her work—disengagement that serves her when the war finally ends and The New Society arises.
To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to—disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, and endangering her own life. But is her “confession” honest—or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?
A jarring and uncanny tale of loss, trauma, and the power of human connection and deception, YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS is a portrait of a disturbing alternate world eerily within reach, and an examination of the difficult choices we must make to survive in it.
Jeffrey Cranor is a novelist and playwright. He cowrites the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also creates theater and dance pieces with his wife, the choreographer Jillian Sweeney.
Janina Matthewson is the author of the novel Of Things Gone Astray and the novella The Understanding of Women. She co-writes Within the Wires, and has also written for Murmurs, The Cipher, and Passenger List.
Cities are dust, histories lost, and time stands still.
A quick, straightforward, fast-paced read about Mateo, a boy who not only can fight off disease in a world where antibiotics have lost all of their power, but can heal others. This amazing kid is being hunted by those who want to harness and potentially extinguish his ability. When two detectives find themselves caught in the crossfire of the pursuit, they put their careers and their lives at risk, deciding to deliver Mat to The Resistance—an organization they’ve been trained to view as an enemy to the State but soon start to realize is probably society’s last, best hope. 
In the near future, after the internet grinds to a halt amid a wave of cyber-attacks, a company named Zodiac steps in to replace it with an evolved, augmented-reality version called The Grid. Harrigan, a hard-drinking private detective living as off-Grid as possible, is about to be evicted from his apartment when a stranger shows up asking for his help in finding Anna, an escort who he claims he’s desperately in love with. Turns out that through Harrigan’s new client, Anna has come into possession of a program/entity called Mirror, Mirror, which has the capacity to merge The Grid and reality, bending both to the whims of the program’s user. Soon Harrigan finds himself up against the last surviving organized crime gangs in Los Angeles, Zodiac’s mercenaries, and a mysterious group called The First Church Multiverse, all of whom are hot on the trail of Mirror, Mirror – if the comet rapidly approaching Earth doesn’t kill them all first.
Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free?