Alexis von Konigslow's ​The Exclusion Zone

Reviewed by Adam McPhee

(Buckrider Books, 2025)

Alexis von Konigslow’s novel The Exclusion Zone is about fear and isolated scientists, not so much science fiction as fiction about the work of science.

Renya is a Canadian scientist who studies fear. She’s designed software that detects fear in facial expressions, and travels to a research centre on the outskirts of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to test it, setting up wildlife camera traps to take surreptitious photos of her colleagues as they go about their work.

She worries she isn’t taken seriously by her male colleagues—physicists and biologists studying the effects of the radiation—and it doesn’t help that she’s something of a nepo baby: her father is a brilliant physicist, her estranged husband is his best student, and her last-minute application to travel to Chernobyl was approved surprisingly fast. Renya herself admits her motivations for the Chernobyl trip include fleeing her shitty marriage and exploring her family’s connection to Ukraine. Still, she reasons, where else but one of the most radioactive sites on Earth are you going to find abundant attempts to conceal expressions of fear from serious adults? Renya further justifies her project while examining archival photos of Soviet politicians: fear was a great motivator in the initial crisis, and so her software could have legitimate uses the next time around.

Renya’s tendency to get competitive on her nightly Skype calls with her husband, to prove she knows as much as he does, is used to clever effect to tell the story of the Chernobyl meltdown and to convey the science involved, a neat way of tricking knowledgeable characters into conveying something they already know or would take for granted (deftly avoiding what Vince Gilligan calls ‘how long have we been brothers’-type dialogue).

There are two kinds of iconic images of Chernobyl that the author gets a lot of mileage out of. The first, more straightforward, is the liminal stuff, the abandoned urban and residential areas, slowly crumbling in the absence of humans. The other is more intriguing and I think a little harder to pin down: a sort of pastoral image, though with more weeds than flowers, the positive values and associations inverted by the invisible threat of radiation. The inviting pool of water and the welcoming tree branch become anti-idyllic, something to flee from and fear.

The novel is set in 2013, before the Maidan Revolution and before the war with Russia. While it avoids politics, it’s hard not to detect some covid anxiety bubbling up to the surface: the scientists are told to wear masks but never do because the cheap elastics keep snapping, and Renya’s husband spends a lot of time scolding her via Skype, telling her not to go outside and not to take any risks. Renya prefers to go exploring, both on her own and in the company of a mysterious Ukrainian security guard who shows her places she couldn’t have discovered on her own, and who she comes to suspect is involved with the looters who can be heard at night.
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The novel is not without its disappointments: the author is capable of invoking fear—when one of the few women at the site is subjected to unwanted advances, and in a climactic scene where Renya’s local guides turn on her—and yet more often we’re treated to catalogues of facial muscles given in unfamiliar anatomical terms and simply tagged as a display of fear. Ultimately, the novel doesn’t quite cohere in a satisfying way, but that isn’t to say it’s disappointing. The Exclusion Zone’s meandering plot is never quite sure where it wants to go, but as a wandering meditation it has a knack for stumbling onto intriguing insights.

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Adam McPhee is a Canadian writer whose fiction has appeared in Old Moon Quarterly and Ahoy Comics, and has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. His book reviews and non-fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Exacting Clam, minor literature[s], Temz Review, Necessary Fiction, Samuel Pepys Club Magazine, and elsewhere. He writes the Substack newsletter Adam’s Notes.