The Dead and the Gone

Lore & Background

The Dead and the Gone follows Alex Morales, a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican boy living in New York City with his parents and younger sisters, Briana and Julie. After an asteroid hits the Moon and pushes it closer to Earth, Alex’s mother is called to the hospital and his father is in Puerto Rico, leaving Alex to care for his sisters. The novel depicts their struggle for survival as food becomes scarce, volcanic eruptions block the sun, and the city undergoes mandatory evacuations. Alex engages in body shopping—looting corpses for supplies—and eventually loses his sister Briana to death in an elevator after the power fails.

Reader's Guide

The Dead and the Gone is significant as a companion novel to Life As We Knew It, offering a parallel perspective on the same catastrophic event from a different location and socioeconomic background. Susan Beth Pfeffer chose a third-person narrative because she could not envision a teenage boy keeping a diary, contrasting with the first-person journal format of the first book. The novel explores themes of family, faith, and survival under extreme duress, and it sets up the subsequent books in The Last Survivors series. Its legacy lies in expanding the scope of the series and providing a male protagonist’s viewpoint on the disaster.

Did You Know?

• The Dead and the Gone occurs at the same time as Life As We Knew It but in New York City.
• The novel was inspired by the 1979 film Meteor, which made Pfeffer think about how kids would cope with an end-of-the-world scenario.
• Alex Morales engages in 'body shopping'—looting abandoned corpses for food and supplies.

Conception and Narrative Shift

Susan Beth Pfeffer's impetus for The Last Survivors series traces back to a 1979 film, Meteor, which prompted her to consider what would happen to children when the world ends and the people with the most to lose are those too young to control their circumstances. The Dead and the Gone, published in hardcover in May 2008 as the second installment, extends that premise into New York City, unfolding simultaneously with the events of its predecessor, Life As We Knew It. A notable structural choice distinguishes this volume: where the first novel relied on a first-person journal voice, Pfeffer shifted to a third-person perspective. Her explanation was refreshingly candid—she simply could not picture a teenage boy maintaining a diary. Pfeffer has also spoken with playful ambition about the series' potential reach, noting that with three hundred million Americans alive and a plan to follow roughly ten characters per book, the single meteor event could sustain nearly three million additional novels, keeping her creatively engaged well beyond the foreseeable future.

The Morales Family Under Siege

Seventeen-year-old Alex Morales, a Puerto Rican teenager in New York City, finds himself thrust into a caretaker role the moment an asteroid strikes the Moon and drags it closer to Earth. His father is in Puerto Rico attending their grandmother's funeral, and his mother, a nurse, is summoned to the hospital, leaving Alex alone with his younger sisters Briana and Julie. His older brother Carlos, serving in the Marines, is far away. In the days that follow, a storm floods the subway lines his mother depends on, a hurricane batters Puerto Rico, and communication with both parents becomes increasingly uncertain. Uncle Jimmy helps the family stock supplies, and brief phone reassurances from Carlos and what Briana believes is their father offer fleeting comfort. As weeks pass without confirmation, the sisters' anxiety deepens. Briana is eventually sent to an upstate convent for safety, while Alex and Julie remain in their apartment, scavenging food from abandoned units in their building after neighbors flee the city.

Moral Erosion and Spiritual Anchoring

As the crisis drags into summer and volcanic gases dim the sun, Alex and his friend Kevin resort to what they call body shopping, stripping abandoned corpses of valuables to trade for food. The practice corrodes Alex's conscience. When Briana returns from the convent suffering from asthma triggered by the degraded air, his guilt intensifies, and he seeks out Father Francis Mulrooney, the retired priest temporarily serving as principal at his all-boys Catholic school. Mulrooney absolves him, affirming that the drive to keep his sisters alive is righteous, and urges him to find reasons for gratitude amid the suffering. Inspired, Alex organizes a surprise thirteenth-birthday party for Julie. Yet the moral landscape continues to darken: a dealer named Harvey offers to evacuate Alex and Briana only if Julie is surrendered to an anonymous buyer, a demand Alex flatly rejects. Kevin is killed by a falling tree branch during a looting run. And in the novel's most devastating turn, Briana is found dead in an elevator after a brief power restoration fails. Alex confesses his grief to Mulrooney and Sister Rita before the siblings depart New York for Georgia.

Architecture of a Parallel Dystopia

The Dead and the Gone occupies a precise slot in The Last Survivors sequence, arriving after Life As We Knew It and before This World We Live In and The Shade of the Moon. Its most distinctive design choice is temporal: the narrative runs parallel to the first book's events rather than following them chronologically, transplanting the same global catastrophe into the dense, multi-ethnic landscape of New York City. This allows Pfeffer to examine how a single asteroid impact reverberates differently across geography, family structure, and community context. The shift from a first-person journal to a third-person narrator, which Pfeffer attributed to her inability to imagine a teenage boy writing a diary, also broadens the novel's observational range, letting the reader witness Alex's decisions from a slight remove. The book's young-adult science-fiction-dystopian classification is reinforced by its escalating environmental threats—flooding, hurricanes, volcanic ash, mandatory evacuations, and a flu quarantine—that layer one crisis atop another, ensuring the Morales family never regains a stable footing.