The First to Die at the End

What's inside (10 sections)

1. The night the first call goes out
2. The boy who expected the call
3. The boy who did not want it
4. The first hospital
5. Living the day
6. The Decker nobody called
7. How it plugs into the original
8. What works and what does not
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

I read They Both Die at the End in one sitting and it left me hollow for a week, so when Adam Silvera finally wrote the prequel I bought it on release and then took my time with it, which is the wrong order of operations but the right one for a book built around a countdown. The First to Die at the End is generous in some places and heavy-handed in others, and it asks a harder question than the novel it precedes: what does the very first End Day cost?

Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, published it on 4 October 2022. The edition runs 560 pages and carries the ISBN 9780063240803. The UK edition came from Simon & Schuster Children's UK in July 2023. The Death-Cast series numbers this volume as book zero, since it is the prologue to They Both Die at the End (2017), a novel this site already covers. The gap between the two books is five years, though Silvera says the prequel itself came together in a few months of work, and it runs a hundred and seventy-six pages longer than the book it sets up. It was a number one New York Times bestseller, and Publishers Weekly named it one of its Best Books of the Year.

The novel opens with a date and a time and does not stop volunteering them. 30 July 2010, 10:10 p.m. That is the night Death-Cast goes live, and the year matters, because everything happens seven years earlier is the joke the whole series runs on.

The night the first call goes out

Orion Pagan is in Times Square with his best friend Dalma Young for the launch party of Death-Cast, a subscription service that claims to know the day you will die. Every screen in the square has been swapped for a digital hourglass on a white background. Vendors are selling skull shot glasses and shirts that say Death-Cast is dying to call you. A man wanders past with a hand-lettered sign claiming Death-Cast is ending the world. Orion has been waiting for this night for years, and the reason is plain: he has a severe heart condition and has spent his life assuming the news will arrive without warning.

You learn the service's mechanics fast. It costs $275 a month and insurance does not cover it. People who receive a call are called Deckers, a name Death-Cast's founder chose because every person is the captain on the deck of their own ship. The staff who place the calls are called heralds. Calls begin at midnight, and the company never explains how it knows.

Valentino Prince, nineteen, has been in the city for a few hours. He flew in from Phoenix, Arizona, that afternoon and cried on the plane and again when New York came into focus through the window. He is starting over. His twin sister Scarlett is a photographer and flies in the next morning. Their parents are strict and religious, and their response when Valentino told them he is gay was to treat him like a houseguest who had overstayed. He has not signed up for Death-Cast. He is not sure he believes in it.

They meet by accident in the crowd at 11:17 p.m., when Orion works up the nerve to talk to the good-looking stranger he keeps noticing. Dalma gets mistaken for his girlfriend, which corrects itself fast. Orion tells Valentino about the attacks that killed both his parents, about never getting to say goodbye, about wanting to know in advance so that he is never denied one again. That story is what moves Valentino. At 11:52 p.m., eight minutes before launch, he signs up for one day of the service.

Then the calls go out, and the boy with the whole life ahead of him is the one who hears a phone ring.

Joaquin Rosa, the founder, makes that first call himself, which he explains later is a matter of history rather than policy. The word he uses for Valentino is Decker. He tells Valentino that sometime in the next twenty-four hours he will meet an untimely death, that nobody can know how or when, and that he still has a chance to live. Then he says, "Live this day to the fullest," and a gunshot cracks across Times Square.

"People thought I was going to do a fake-out. None of us is going to be the exception to death."

That is Silvera, talking about the title, and it is the promise the book makes with your stomach.

The boy who expected the call

Orion is eighteen and tall for his age, with his father's Yankees cap pulled over brown curls, and he lives in the Bronx with the family that took him in. His mother, Dayana, was his own mother's best friend, and after 9/11 she and her husband Floyd became his legal guardians. Dalma is his adoptive sister and Dahlia her younger one. There is a lot of ordinary life in that house, and a lot of monitoring, because Dalma tracks his heartbeat without making a fuss about it.

His parents died in the south tower on 11 September 2001, when he was nine and in fourth grade, and he watched it happen on a security-desk monitor at school, not understanding at first that it was New York. They went into the city for a meeting. There was no warning and no goodbye. That is the whole engine of his interest in Death-Cast: if you cannot control when you go, at least you can control whether you get to say it.

He has cardiomyopathy, and he is on a wait list for a heart that might take years to arrive. He writes, wants to be an author, and thinks of himself as a short story that may not get a novel's worth of pages. He signs up because a known date would mean he could plan a good goodbye.

What is most interesting is how Death-Cast changes a whole city around him. People argue about it in the street. Some think it is a scam, some a government plot, some want to be near a Decker in case death is contagious. At the premiere, attendees are moved to explain why they signed up, which turns the launch into a public confession.

The boy who did not want it

Valentino is not a cautious man. He is a runway man, with the body for it and the restless confidence that makes a photographer shout about lighting. He moved to New York for the work, and he lands a job modeling for an agent named Laverne, who is kind to him in a distracted, professional way and who will not believe a word of Death-Cast when he tells her.

His sister almost died in a car accident back in May. His parents treated their religion as a family business, and when he came out to them they began treating him as a stranger in their own house. He did not run away from an argument. He ran away from a life in which he was invisible.

So when Death-Cast rings him at midnight, his first instinct is bargaining. He asks whether this is a registration error. He asks whether Rosa might have confused him with another Valentino Prince, which is a joke about his own face and also a way of refusing the premise. He tells the crowd that he has plans: sleep, the photo shoot, dinner on the hardwood floor with the boxes as tables. He is not going to lie down and die politely.

Orion, by contrast, has been rehearsing for this his whole life, and that difference is the engine of the book. The boy who expected to die learns how to live. The boy who expected to live learns he does not get to choose.

The first hospital

The gunshot in Times Square is not aimed at Valentino, but it puts him on the ground, and Orion knocks him down to protect him, which is the wrong way round for a boy with a bad heart. Orion's heart gives out. Dalma and Valentino get him to the hospital, and he comes back from the edge slowly over hours of monitoring and worry. His doctor is Dr. Emeterio, one of the book's best minor characters, who treats him with professional briskness and real tenderness and has her own reasons for caring about his case.

It is in a hospital corridor that the plot of the novel becomes unmistakable. Orion tells Valentino that he is on the transplant list and that the wait could be long. Valentino, who came to the hospital as a stranger a few hours earlier, tells him he wants to give him his heart. They run the tests. They match.

From here on, everyone in the story knows how it ends, and Silvera gets to run two clocks at once: Orion's body failing on its own schedule, and Valentino's death, which the doctors will try to prevent and which will arrive anyway the moment he reaches brain death. When that happens, the heart goes to Orion. The board approves the transplant. The paperwork is real. The love interest is on a form somewhere.

Living the day

What follows is the best part of the book, and Silvera earns it by giving the two boys something to do. They go to Ground Zero, where Orion finally stands where his parents were and decides to be strong for them. They go to the modeling agency for the photo shoot and find that the photographer is dead and the shoot has been pushed two days, so Valentino's first professional day in New York collapses. Orion buys a camera from a pawn shop and shoots him on the High Line instead, giving him the pictures his career cannot. They cross the Brooklyn Bridge, where they talk about marriage and children and then kiss, which is the moment the book stops being about death for a page or two.

On the subway, Orion dances, because Valentino wants to see a subway performer and Orion decides to be one. Then he plays music and walks Valentino down the car like a runway, and a boy who grew up invisible in his parents' house gets seen by strangers in a subway car. That is the real love scene of the book, and it happens in a moving train with no doors.

They return to Times Square and learn two things. There is a Decker somewhere who signed up and never got a call, and the company is saying so publicly without explaining why. And every flight out of Arizona has been grounded, because a pilot was called, so Scarlett cannot come. She has been the last person Valentino wanted to see all day, and now she is not coming.

At the Youngs' house, with the family away, Valentino calls his parents and tells them he is dying. They listen and say nothing. He says he has had a great day with his boyfriend, and hangs up. Later he records a video for Scarlett, and a second one for Orion, in case he does not get to say the rest in person.

The Decker nobody called

The thread that finally kills Valentino starts in the worst possible place, which is a landlord's apartment.

Frankie Dario owns the building Valentino rents. He is a failing photographer and an abusive husband. His wife Gloria has been quietly planning to leave him. Gloria's friend Rolando Rubio used to work at Death-Cast as a herald, hated the job, and quit. Frankie wants photographs of a Decker dying, and he talks Rolando into giving him a name. Rolando gives him Valentino's name and hopes Frankie dies in the process. Frankie had also signed up for the service and never got a call, which makes him the last unserved Decker in the story, and he ends up dead without being warned.

While that is brewing, Rolando tells Gloria he loves her, and she decides to go home and tell Frankie the truth. What happens next is ugly and fast. Frankie attacks Gloria. She screams. Valentino hears her from the stairwell and runs up, and Frankie shoves him down the stairs. Paz, Gloria's son, picks up his father's gun.

The hospital finds Valentino alive but not responding, and the doctors announce brain death. So the transplant goes forward, and a body that had been built for runway lights is opened for the heart that keeps Orion Pagan alive. Orion says goodbye to him before surgery. The transplant works.

Scarlett arrives the next day. She watches the video he left for her and finds the second one, the one he made for Orion, and gives him the drive. Valentino tells him to live his life for both of them, to fall in love again, and to keep going. The last word in the book belongs to a dead boy on a phone screen.

How it plugs into the original

If you have read They Both Die at the End, the prequel reads as a footnote to it and then as a whole second novel. Silvera told Publishers Weekly that Death-Cast's founder did not exist as a character when he wrote the first book, and that for the prequel he had to invent Joaquin Rosa, his wife Naya, their son, and the machinery around a service that had previously been just a catalyst. He also noted that everyone in the original had already been subscribed for seven years, which is exactly why this book opens on launch night with signup queues and price tags.

Two things in it turn out to be load-bearing for the sequel. Dalma, who nearly loses both boys in this book, is the one who will build the Last Friend app so that no Decker has to spend an End Day alone, and in the original that app is what pairs Mateo with Rufus. The app itself arrives later, in the bonus story that follows the prequel. And there are cameo chapters from Mateo and Rufus as children, years before their own End Days, which gives you the pair in a different light before you watch them die.

The title also lands harder once you know it. Valentino was the first person Death-Cast ever called, and the first to die, so the sequel's blunt promise stops being clever and starts being literal. A third book, The Survivor Wants to Die at the End, followed in 2025, with a fourth announced.

What works and what does not

The structure is the achievement. Like the original it is told in short alternating chapters by multiple characters, each with their own voice and their own stake, and the side vignettes are not decoration. Frankie, Gloria, Rolando, Paz, the heralds, Dr. Emeterio: they widen the blast radius of one phone call, and the reader ends up mourning people who were on screen for twenty pages. Silvera has a real feel for a New York street, a subway car, a hospital waiting room at three in the morning, and he writes the romance with generosity rather than coyness.

What weakens the book is length and pressure. It is nearly two hundred pages longer than the original and it repeats itself. Readers who came to the original for its velocity report finding the middle saggy. The ending accumulates. The gunshot, the heart attack, the transplant list, the parents who will not speak, Gloria, Frankie, the stairs, brain death: Silvera stacks so many catastrophes on one boy that the finale can feel engineered rather than inevitable, and some readers found it cruel rather than sad. The sex scene is short to the point of feeling like a summary. Kirkus called it a rush of emotion and suspense and praised both leads, though plenty of readers found the accumulation of catastrophes engineered rather than inevitable.

Silvera writes with a heavy hand here in a way he did not in the original, and that shift in tone is the main reason the reception split. The 2017 novel moves like a fairy tale with a knife in it. The prequel is closer to melodrama, and it wants your tears rather than earning all of them.

It is for readers of the original and for people who like a high concept played straight, with a cast large enough to make a city feel populated. It is not a safe book: there is a shooting, a heart attack, an abusive marriage, a murder, and a clinical hospital sequence that will be hard going for some people.

I am glad it exists, mostly because it does not let Death-Cast stay a haunting idea. It makes a service out of it, with a price, a staff, a founder who cannot say how it works, and a queue of people who want to know. What it does not do is leave you with a clean lesson. The boy who thought he was dying learns to live, the boy who thought he was living dies on schedule, and the last thing the story gives us is a heart moving from one chest to another. Silvera is not offering comfort here. He is offering an invoice.

FAQ

Who gets the Death-Cast call in The First to Die at the End?

Valentino Prince receives the very first call, at midnight on the night Death-Cast launches. Orion Pagan does not get one, though he has a serious heart condition. Valentino dies during the novel, and Orion receives his heart in a transplant.

Do I need to read They Both Die at the End first?

No. The prequel stands on its own, and Silvera says either order works. Knowing the original adds context for the cameo chapters about Mateo and Rufus and for the Last Friend app.

How much time do Orion and Valentino have together?

They meet at 11:17 p.m. on 30 July 2010 and the first calls go out at midnight. Death-Cast tells Valentino he will die sometime within the next twenty-four hours.