Books like The Familiar

Hoo boy. This is a bizarre book, and I have a lot to say about it!Ghostwriter: Ellen Geroux, who wrote the grueling #33 The Illusion, which means there's finally some proper callbacks to #33, showing some of the lingering repercussions of that book on Tobias: the experience has left him shaken and withdrawn, which breaks my heart so much.This being the same writer also makes sense because you guys, this book is a lot a lot a lot. Only 14 pages in, I was rattled and sending hysterical messages to a friend (hi Stephanie ♥️). The opening scene is killer, and if everything that followed was like that, this would have been 5 stars for me: in the span of such few pages it's one of the worst fights they've ever seen, unbelievably gory and violent and horrifying; Rachel enters a psychotic bloodlust rage (another sign of her devolution, and a foreshadowing of things to come); Marco assesses the situation and tells Jake to leave him and Rachel behind because otherwise none of them are getting out; Jake makes the call to abandon those two for the sake of the team; Cassie has a complete nervous breakdown afterwards complete with silent sobbing, and rather than comfort her, Jake walks away from her.It's this crucial battle, and everyone's shattered reactions to it, that propels the plot for the rest of the book: launching 10 years into the future, where the Yeerks have won, a post-apocalyptic dystopia where all of the Animorphs are infested or broken shells of themselves. It's reminiscent of Rachel's vision of a similar 'bad guys win' future in #7 The Stranger (how great is it that both cousins have had this vision now?), except this is much much much darker. And it's similar to the AU 'roads not taken' Megamorphs #4 -- which apparently came out right before this book too, but oops I got the order backwards so I'm going to be reading Megamorphs next.Also, do I shelve this book as "time travel" or "dreams"? WHAT DO I DO??? In the end, though, I'm opting for seeing it as an extended dream sequence, because there's just so much that doesn't line up (e.g. (view spoiler)[the "you're dead" but then "you have a job that situates you well to sabotage this project"; Jake seeing the old and battered hawk despite Tobias no longer using the hawk form; Rachel and Marco not morphing to heal their injuries; Jake sporadically not being able to morph; the FUCKING BIZARRE UNDERGROUND TREE PEACE ENCLAVE scene; the Hork-Bajir blood colour being wrong; Marco saying the wrong Visser number at one point; the Yeerks having infested the Animorphs but somehow not knowing about morph-capable humans; Cassie yelling in thought-speak as a human; possibly even real-life things like the library using aisle E rather than the Dewey Decimal system, when the E also stands for Evolutionist Front, or even Essak (hide spoiler)]