Review: Our Last Resort - Clemence Michallon
Review: Our Last Resort - Clemence Michallon - July 2025
I'll be honest with you when I picked up Our Last Resort almost entirely because the blurb whispered Waco and Jonestown to me. A cult in upstate New York. A dramatic escape. Siblings carrying the weight of something unspeakable. I was practically already in my reading chair before I'd finished the synopsis. Sometimes a premise is just that good.
The flashback sequences to Frida and Gabriel's cloistered upbringing have that eerie, suffocating quality that makes cult narratives so compulsively readable , the kind of world where the walls feel like they're slowly closing in even when everything looks perfectly ordered from the outside. That tension is real, and it's the engine that kept me turning pages.
The present-day setup has promise too. The Ara Hotel a luxury desert retreat in Escalante, Utah is a gorgeous setting, all heat-shimmer and isolation. A dead woman. A powerful older husband. A brother with a troubling history who becomes the prime suspect. On paper, this is everything I want from a thriller.
But here's where I start to waver. The dual timeline between past and present can be a brilliant device, and sometimes here it is. Other times, it feels like it's working against the story's momentum rather than building it. I found myself losing the thread a little between the two worlds, and what should have felt like escalating dread occasionally landed more like... a mild inconvenience. There were moments where I genuinely couldn't pinpoint why the pacing felt off, just that something was a little disjointed, like a song that's almost in tune.
Frida is a compelling protagonist with her internal conflict between loyalty to Gabriel and the creeping doubt she can no longer suppress is the emotional core of the novel, and it's well-drawn. I wanted more of her, and a little less of the mechanics.
Our Last Resort isn't a bad book , not by a long stretch. It's a solid 3 Phantom Ps: readable, atmospheric in stretches, and genuinely gripping in its cult sequences. But if you come in, like I did, expecting Jonestown-level dread to sustain the whole narrative, you may find the resort a little less unsettling than advertised.
Worth a read on a long weekend. Just maybe don't book the holiday around it.
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