Alice Sola Kim: Station Eleven and An Untamed State are immediately similar in two respects, in that they deal with people grappling with the aftereffects of trauma, and in that I had already read and loved both books prior to participating in the Tournament of Books. So it’s just wonderful, especially super-great for me to be pitting the two against each other, and I don’t at all feel like hurling.

Alice Sola Kim is a writer and office manager. Her fiction has recently been published or is forthcoming in Tin House, Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I had a story reprinted in an anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.”

Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State is the story of Mireille Duval Jameson, a happy and privileged Haitian-American woman successful in all things—love, career, family—who is kidnapped for ransom during a trip to her father’s Port-au-Prince estate. She is held for 13 days, during which she is continually raped and tortured by a gang of men. When the ransom is paid and Mireille is freed, she is left traumatized and unfamiliar to herself, alone in the world despite her family and loved ones.

What really struck me about An Untamed State is that there are no skipped steps. You don’t skip over what Mireille endures. You know what happens and what parts of her hurt. There are many pitfalls to writing about people who have been brutalized. Sometimes details get glossed over, because the word “rape” alone is intended to tell you everything. At the other end of the spectrum, too many details make crumpled paper dolls out of people, and then the brutality becomes the point, not the people. But in An Untamed State, Mireille is always the point. Her charmed life up to her kidnapping is shown in full, so you know who she was before and what she has to lose. You see everything that happens to her during her captivity: what she goes through, and how she absolutely must change in order to survive it.

Then Mireille gets out and there’s still more than a third of the book to go. This is another aspect of An Untamed State that I truly admired: how it makes it so clear that freedom isn’t free and healing is hell, too.

“I’m sorry I have to do this,” Evelyn said softly, “but I will be as careful as I can.” I was so sick of sorry. Slowly, I began to inch my legs apart, my body opening. Evelyn gently placed each of my heels into the stirrups. She began to explain what she was doing but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t care. It hurt more than I expected but I didn’t know how to say anything. I didn’t know how to say stop, please, stop. There is nothing I cannot take.

Throughout, the prose is blunt and dynamic, unadorned and action-movie-propulsive, carefully describing power dynamics and the emotional frequencies of its characters with an effective simplicity. Occasionally it can feel clunky and stagey, especially the dialogue, peppered with infelicities such as “A beautiful body deserves a beautiful bikini” and “unhand me.” I felt this most when Michael, Mireille’s husband, was involved, and I wondered if maybe the book was addressing something with regards to the romance genre or fairy tale tropes (Mireille’s life is compared to a fairy tale in both the jacket copy and the book itself), but I don’t know.

Related to that, the few parts of the book told from Michael’s point of view are not as good as the rest. Yet they do serve an important purpose that exemplifies the generous and expansive spirit of the book: evincing sympathy for those who are close to people who have undergone trauma.

This is this spirit that makes An Untamed State such a moving and hopeful read, not only an unbearable one. It is what brought me to tears while reading, but kept me at it—so much so that when my worried boyfriend approached, I waved him away like I had the Georgia flu and shrieked, “It’s OK! It’s a book! Let me finish!”

And speaking of.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel takes place before, during, and after a deadly flu pandemic (the aforementioned Georgia strain), and follows a constellation of intricately connected characters: a movie star, his former best friend, his ex-wife, a former paparazzo/paramedic, and a post-apocalyptic traveling band of Shakespearean actors.

It was a pure pleasure to read something so finely made, something that swept me through so many years and characters and milieus without a single catch or bump. Station Eleven contains Hollywood gossip and flu outbreaks and theatre troupes, but it’s never a mess. The tone throughout is consistent—nostalgic yet fully alive to the fragility and beauty of the world—and each narrative strand serves the whole: the badass knife-throwing actress Kirsten Raymonde wanders a transformed world performing Shakespeare without knowing that she’s obsessed with the same comic book series, given to her by the famous actor who died right before the Georgia flu changed everything, as the deranged prophet causing trouble from town to town. And so on.

I felt completely taken care of while reading Station Eleven, that rare and delicious sensation I’ve had during so many books and films I’ve loved. Dots are connected; stories are rivetingly spun outward and back in again. With masterful shifts in perspective, the book zooms in on one tiny life or zooms out to casually state that commercial air travel would end in two weeks. Like a snow globe, it gave me the pleasure of being able to survey the whole of something beautiful from the outside:

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China.

The apocalypse in Station Eleven is a pretty gentle one, as apocalypses go. In some respects, this was refreshing. Not everything has to end with cannibalism-diarrhea-gangrene. And because Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic novel not about those things, it is free to be about other things—the things we’ll miss about that old and ostentatious world, the things we use to rebuild a new one. We can prioritize beauty and comfort, connection and goodness.

But it also means that it didn’t seem that hard to be good in the world of Station Eleven. Accordingly, the element that didn’t really work for me was the prophet, who seemed stapled in to serve as a random bad guy (despite the ways in which he is connected to the other characters). On the whole, the book felt anesthetized from its own emotions; everyone seemed to be looking back on everything through a thick pane of crystal even as it was happening. Even pain and sorrow weirdly almost felt good, bittersweet at worst.

Now, I love feeling good, and I love to feel good while reading a good book. I’m thrilled that Station Eleven exists. I’m thrilled that both of these books I’m judging exist. But if I have to pick one? I’m going with the one that’s a breathless gasp of pain. The one that is a gasp that gradually, painfully slows and adjusts itself to the rhythms of normal life as you root for it all the way. Because when I remember Station Eleven, I think more about things and tableaus, not about people. But I remember the woman at the heart of An Untamed State, and I won’t forget her soon.

I have no doubt that Station Eleven could make for a gorgeously constructed, glittering Swiss-clockwork Zombie, and if that happens I will give it one of those hearty but cautious human-to-Zombie high-fives. But right now, here’s to An Untamed State.