Enjoy Your Stay: A Guest Post by Kenneth Oppel

By Kenneth Oppel / June 3, 2025 at 1:45 am

A Twilight Zone-esque premise — a family cabin disappears. This is a story of speculative cause-and-effect packed with psychological suspense that will give your brain a good jog. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Kenneth Oppel on writing Best of All Worlds.

Hardcover $19.99

Best of All Worlds

By Kenneth Oppel

In Stock Online

Hardcover $19.99

From award-winning author Kenneth Oppel a startling, can’t-wait-to-talk-about-it-with-someone novel that defies genre to create a survival thriller unlike any you’ve read before. For fans of Leave the World Behind, A.S. King, M.T. Anderson, and Margaret Atwood.

I’ve always loved survival thrillers — Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies, Life of Pi, Room – that chronicle not just the heroes’ endurance and resourcefulness but also their psychological journey. It’s fascinating to watch characters under immense pressure, seeing their fault lines, wondering whose are more liable to crack wide open.

When I first started work on Best of All Worlds I thought I was going to write a story about a teenager and his family abducted by aliens and put in a zoo. I got excited wondering what creatures might be in the other enclosures — and how secure they might be. Maybe there’d be lots of running and screaming and monster fighting, like an alien Jurassic Park. This was a fun idea, but I felt like I’d seen it before.

I decided it would be more interesting if neither my hero Xavier Oak (nor the readers) ever saw aliens. Aliens are often such a let down anyway — so hard to create an original one! The idea of unseen captors struck me as much more interesting. And for that matter, were they aliens at all?

I wanted to keep the focus laser tight on Xavier and his family (and the Jackson family who arrive later), and how they deal with their predicament. First how they try to explain what’s happened to them, then to form a plan of action.

But would I let Xavier and the others escape? Would they find a way out?

And what if escape was the worst thing that could happen?

The two families, it turns out, have very different notions about where they are, and who put them there. Are they in outer space, or deep underground on Earth? Are their captors aliens or the nefarious deep state? For me, the heart of the story is Xavier’s tightrope walk between his family and the Jacksons, both of whom are convinced they know the truth.

Best of All Worlds is primarily a thriller but I also wrote it because I was fed up with science deniers, conspiracy theories, and rampant misinformation; I was angry seeing the word freedom deformed to justify self-interest, to trample the rights of others with impunity.

My hope for this book is that, after reading it, people will talk about it, and maybe argue about it. I see this book as an invitation for the reader to wonder not just “What would I do in this situation?” but also “What might work better?” Because if escape isn’t an option, we really do have to make it work, all of us, together.

Enjoy your stay in the dome.

Photo Credit: Mark Raynes Roberts