Dead Happy
by Josh Silver
Bloomsbury
Josh Silver’s debut YA novel HappyHead was a bleak satire on the wellness industry which wanted to fix ‘the epidemic of unhappiness’ among teenagers, but ended up being a twisted love story where teenagers who ‘did not fit in’ were isolated for extreme experimental conversion treatment.
Former actor and member of the LGBTQI+ community, Silver brings his own experiences to his writing and also now works as a teenager mental health nurse. His novel isolates teenagers and puts them through a terrifying program, supposedly to solve their mental health problems.
Ten teenagers are paired off and sent to a remote Scottish island and have to complete one torturous task after another “to prove their love for each other”. Seventeen-year-old Seb, who has struggled with his sexuality, is paired off with Eleanor who is keen to win but he can’t help thinking about what happened to Finn.
It certainly helps if you have read the previous book HappyHead, where Seb’s love interest Finn is deemed resistant to finding happiness and is put into the bottom percentile at the HappyHead facility. Seb finds out that he is actually on the island with the rest of the bottom percentile and they are treated as slaves to ‘The Ten’.
To survive, Seb has to pretend that he on board with the program but the narrative includes his cynical inner commentary about their adult minders Ares and Artemis and the cult-like dialogue they spout.
Seb realises that all the teenagers on the island, and possibly their minders as well, are just pawns being pushed around by the creator of a sinister eugenics program, who just happens to be Eleanor’s aunt.
Ultimately, Silver’s tense thriller is about not bowing to pressure to fit in with other’s expectations. As the tasks become more life-threatening and the bottom percentile become more dispensable, Seb tells Finn that they have a choice “to believe it’s OK that we aren’t what people want us to be”.
But, in order to live happily ever after, they have to escape the island and expose those running the program.
Lezly Herbert
