The Hit by Melvin Burgess (review)

The sins of greedy corporations and corrupt governments are being called to account in mass protests all over England, and a rebel group, the Zealots, has found an unusual weapon to ignite the revolution: a drug called Death, which gives users one week of intense vitality before killing them. The Zealots hope that when people see masses of young people seeking the ultimate escape from present poverty and hopeless futures, they will be moved to overthrow the system. Their plan is working, especially when a famous rock star dies on stage after blogging about his week on Death. Working-class Adam and his upper-middle-class girlfriend, Lizzie, are caught up in the euphoria of the demonstrations, but when Adam finds out that his brother, Jess, is a member of the Zealots and has been killed, he takes the drug himself, determined to give his life some sort of excitement and meaning before he dies. Lizzie is by turns flattered and horrified by the idea of helping him realize his final dreams; teased by the promise of an antidote, she ends up being the enslaved and tortured victim of the psychotic son of a drug lord, while Adam and Jess, who’s not dead after all, try in their separate ways to right both personal and societal wrongs. Burgess has his hands full cramming a wide range of social ills—income inequality, disaffected youth, systemic corruption, club drug use—into a page-turning thriller punctuated by disappointing sex, grisly murder and hair-breadth escapes; fortunately he’s a more than competent juggler. Adam and Lizzie are almost touchingly naïve in their seriously poor judgment; their plight, while necessarily exaggerated, reads like an anthem for the teenage condition as they face some of life’s biggest questions with scant moral and intellectual resources and no adult role models. The book raises multiple questions that teens will want to discuss.