Reid Sherline’s debut novella, Rapture, winner of the 2023 Harvard Review Chapbook Prize, follows a boy caught up in the dark millenarian dreams of a damaged Vietnam veteran. A powerful story of obsession and yearning set in late twentieth-century Los Angeles and inspired by the Book of Revelations, described by contest judge Lily King as “a brutal and beautiful exploration of the devastating extent a child will go to find security and love and a sense of meaning.”

Rapture is a marvel of compression and packs the punch of a three-hundred-page novel. The writing is exquisite and the story a brutal and beautiful exploration of the devastating extent a child will go to find an approximation of security and love and a sense of meaning.
-- Lily King