I loved Laura Piper Lee’s Pot Shot. I highly encourage you to read it. It’s still on my list for top five reads of 2026. My feelings about Doomsdate are more mixed, but if you are looking for a good mix of horror and romance, it does what it says on the tin.
Maisie was raised isolated by her mother, an end of the world prepper whose schizophrenia caused her to live in extreme paranoia. Maisie has spent many years unlearning the fears her mother taught her and gradually integrating herself into the world. But mostly she stays in her Durham, NC apartment and interact with people online. As her 30th birthday approaches, she wants to lose her virginity and travel. Everett has been mourning his late wife and not interested in living. His best friend creates a dating app profile for him, matches him with Maisie, and sets a dinner date with her. He tells Everett about it a few minutes before the date so that he’s forced to go. Meanwhile, a gastrointestinal virus is sweeping the nation causing vomiting and diarrhea, butt Covid if you will.
Maisie and Everett hit it off so much that Everett decides to go back to her apartment, though they find themselves dodging sick people and pools of bodily fluids. I have a trigger happy gag reflex and a vivid imagination, so these early chapters with the frequent splats was tough for me to get through. If I hadn’t already read Pot Shot, I might not have powered through. After some fits and starts, the zombie apocalypse begins and Maisie, Everett, and his cat, Chicken, are roadtripping through the Shenandoah to Washington DC, where Everett will stay with his sister, and Maisie will continue up to spend the rest of the apocalypse with Gramps, an elderly prepper she’s become close to. Of course things go awry repeatedly.
What I loved about Doomsdate, and the reason I rounded up to 4 stars, was the emotional core of the book. Maisie is choosing to live life and in doing so, inspires Everett to do the same. Against the backdrop of Zombie America, they choose living along with surviving. They make detours to see and experience things before they plan to shut themselves off from the world again. The relationship they build between flights for their lives, sex lessons, and navigating other survivors is lovely.
The world around them feels less well thought through. One of my favorite things about Pot Shot was the illumination of policy through fiction. Laura Piper Lee has experience with chronic illness and navigating the American health care system as a woman with a chronic condition. Whatever your opinion on medicinal and recreational marijuana use, Lee has articulated her position clearly and thoughtfully. Doomsdate’s opinions on the American food system are less clear. I won’t get into who the culprits are, but the food we eat plays an important role in the apocalypse. Reading this while also reading food recall after recall, felt relevant, but also frustrating. I’m not sure if Lee pulled her punches, or if, like many of us, her feelings about the degradation of systems we rely on to stay healthy and safe are more amorphous rage. It is a horror romance so I don’t expect a policy white paper along with the yearning and danger banging. But the lack of clarity made the world around Maisie and Everett feel mushy.
I highly recommend Doomsdate for a terrifying zombie apocalypse and romantic road trip. Points off for grossing me out more than I was comfortable with and for leaving me confused about what point the author was making about the food distribution system, veganism, and access to convenient foods.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Ballantine and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.
