It's not a poorly written book, nor an interesting story, but as a personal journey it feels underdeveloped. The story follows a woman, Trina, and her struggle to move on with her life after an 'invasion' by an alien species called The Seep and the subsequent loss of her wife to it's effects.
The opening section of the book is quite engrossing. The Seep is not a ln enlightened super civilization nor a race of conquerers, but more of an all-permiating infection, a conscious miasma that induces a drug-like stupor on everyone who ingests it, breaking down the barries between their minds and bringing about an era without war, famin, want, or death. Except not exactly.
The Seep is often vaguely described, it's function vaguely explained, and the exact results and mechanism of it's unification with humanity are inconsistent and contradictory. Which is fine, as it is mostly used as a magical vessel that allows people to enact nearly anything they will; changing their bodies, giving sentience to animals, healing plant and animal life, or allowing them to die as they wish. But it also has will, enforces (through it's stupifying effects) an era of peace and good will between all living beings, yet at moments has the naivete of a child, and struggles to understand why Trina is experiencing grief as she is. What results is The Seep is simultaneously The Force, Big Brother, LSD, & Pinocchio; a combination that never quite resolves into anything coherent.
This incoherence leads to a plot that is full of conveniences, driven less by characters than by arbitrary circumstances. Outside of Trina, characters get limited development; her wife decides to move on--to be reborn again as a child--for reasons that are inconceivable to both Trina and the reader, and though overcoming this divide is the central tension of the work, it never stops feeling like a random act and a poor substitute for death, or suicide. The other significant character, Horizon, gets a similarity one-note story. He took the face of a dead lover when The Seep arrived, adm serves as something of an antagonist to Trina, or she at least makes him out to be one in her mind. That appropriation and facade is the only character development he gets, and the resolution to hai arc is to disintegrate into nothing, shedding all layers of himself. Other characters are secondary, giving very little time to show any depth.
Finally, there is Trina. Her journey is well done, her emotional turmoil clean, but situated in the world Chana has built these normal emotions feel strange. Trina seems to be uniquely immune to many of The Seeps effects, conveniently excepted from the major metamorphoses of the world. Abstaining from The Seep is an option, and people are shown to build up a tolerance to it's effects, but having Trina wade through this dreamlike world without being affected much like anyone else seems to be creates an odd disconnect. Trina is in this world, but feels not of the world.
I would compare this book to some of the writing in the End of Death SCP canon; there humanity experiences an irreconcilable paradigm shift, and those stories are about characters navigating and struggling against the new reality. The Seep introduces a paradigm shift, but does little to grapple with it's implications. It frames the story around The Seep but then makes it set dressing. Trina's wife might as well have 'just' committed suicide. Horizon might as well be any other religions charlatan or cult leader. Post-Seep American could have been any other post-scarcity dis/utopia. You could uproot these characters, put them in modern Detroit, and have a nearly identical story; ignore The Seep entirely. In EoD, Ω-K is inseparable from the characters in it's stories.
The world here has little history, no sense of continuity, it's events fleeting, arbitrary. The story too short to grow meat on the bones it lays out.
Overall, the result is fantastic prose, stunning imagery, but vague and inconsistent world building and thin characters. Engrossing to read, but with little sticking power.
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