Into the Forest: A Novel Review

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Into the Forest: A Novel ReviewI'm a big fan of post holocaust fiction. I've read hundreds of stories over the past 40 years about Life after Doomsday. This is absolutely one of the best. It avoids the common assumptions of the genre. There is no sudden and dramatic change in the lives of the two young protagonists. There isn't an immediate awareness on the part of the community that something awful and terrifying is occurring. People don't suddenly go berserk. Marauding gangs of psychopaths don't appear out of nowhere to prey upon the vulnerability of their fellow citizens. Every character, every behavior, every reaction is believable and easily explained within the context of known human behavior. Everyone initially clings desperately to the belief that things haven't really changed, that the situation isn't that bad, that tomorrow, things will all return to normal. It's just a matter of holding on and continuing with their daily routines.
Hegland's placing of Nell and her sister Eva in a forest, far from the nearest town, was a brilliant device on many levels. Normally, doomsday writers place their protagonists right in the thick of things. They trap them in cities or situations where they can inflict upon them every supposedly predictable terror of life after the collapse, showing us clearly frightened people in clearly frightening times.
But Nell and Eva live in a quiet forest. The forest isn't just a location here. It's not there just to show us the girls' gardening skills or how to live a self-sufficient life. The forest is a major, living, breathing protagonist. Hegland renders it's character brilliantly. It is both serene and tumultuous, comforting and menancing, fiercely protective and neglectful. Placing Nell and her sister in this quiet, slow environment creates a constant sense of dread and tension in the story - what unknowable things are going on outside this ageless, unjudgmental sanctuary? What horrors are taking place? Are cities burning? Has the law of the jungle replaced the fragile contracts between people? Is inescapable death slowing overtaking mankind? Are all the horrors imaginable about to invade this oasis of calm, and when and how will they come? The little intrusions of the outside world that do occur are more terrifying as a result. The forest doesn't protect Nell and Eva from evil. It wreaks no havoc on transgressors, it passes no judgments, it doesn't change or adapt. "Bring it on" it seems to say. "I will not be changed. I will simply out last you, neutralize you with my steadfastness, absord your impact and accept it as part of my nature."
The forest is a sort of allegory for the the human spirit. Primieval, indestructable and unchanging, it survives despite the modern mistakes of humankind.
I disagree strongly with the reviewer who says this is not an inspirational story. It is a story filled with hope and promise. Strip away the false values, the intellectualism, the materialism and the intolerance that are so much a part of the modern human's psyche, and you are left with what got us this far to begin with, and what will save us in the end - a sense of beauty, perseverance, tolerance and acceptance of the world as it is.
It's a beautiful, poetically written story, and well worth a place on anyone's bookshelf.
Into the Forest: A Novel Overview

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Deep Winter Review

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Deep Winter ReviewI really wanted to like this book. I tried so very hard to like this book. Honest, I did. I'm a dystopia/utopia, post-apocalyptic, world is collapsing literature fan like no other. So to have a book being written by someone who is actually a person who understands preparedness that is not just a how-to was an exciting prospect.
Unfortunately, there is no amount of force that can make me like this book.
The story premise is good enough to have made a great book. The Drummonds, a family of 4, are hit by a massive earthquake in the PNW. While this may seem a local disaster, it is quickly followed by the rapid crash of the United States like a large house of cards. Financial messes of the past catch up with us and bank failures domino into a lack of imports without cash, insufficient coverages on debt and personal disasters as corporations fall. The Drummonds and most of the remaining members of their small community are left essentially alone without the massive aid that our country has sent to disaster areas in the past.
Without fuel, electricity and even structurally sound homes, they make do with what they have in creative ways. The community rallies, at least the good guys do, and through much they persevere and turn lawns into farms and spare parts into power.
Sounds good, right? I thought so too. But then I read the first page and my heart sunk. The editing in this book is so bad as to be non-existent. While I understand this is a self-published book, the author is on enough of the same message boards as I am to know that he had a vast resource at his fingertips just to check grammar if he so chose. The run on sentences, bad grammar, repetitive word choice and poor writing habits are obvious and distracting. But I can forgive that, after all, it is self published and like many others in the genre, like Lights Out, there is no rule that says he can't re-write.
But then you have to deal with the brand name bonanza. One of the worst habits that post-apocalyptic or SHTF (S*.^ hit the fan) novels or stories fall into is the incessant listing of brands and model numbers. Every single thing is listed out by brand. The hero doesn't just pull on some boots to go outside. No, he pulls on his Cabela Model XYZ that he got three years ago and show only approximately 30% wear, boots to go outside. ARGH...that is such a bad habit! It is even worse in that it immediately dates the book and makes it irrelevant when models change in a year or two. Enough said about that.
There is also the problem of believability and scale. We don't find out the size of the property the Drummonds live on for over 200 pages, yet we are walked from place to place into a large number of buildings containing an infinite array of stuff. Yet we also know his place is in a subdivision where he can see his neighbors. It is a distracting gap and one that makes it seem like he didn't map out his own setting. It turns out the place is rather small and yet he has more outbuildings than I've seen on a crowded looking 10 acre farmette. And the sheer quantities he talks about of various items, from tractors to generators to large food caches, leaves a mental image of the home of a hoarder in the OCD sense of the word.
And, of course, there is the issue of the man who has everything, knows everything and even more unbelievable, knows where it all is. This might not sound like it would be a major point, but we're not talking about your home workshop here. We're talking such a vast amount of equipment and parts from big to tiny that you would need a warehouse for it all. All this is jumbled up in shaken outbuildings and a half collapsed home. Yet never once does he falter or need directions.
And then there is the attitude. In Deep Winter and Shatter I counted over 800 instances of rank sexism and non-Christian hatemongering. After a second reading, in which I took notes and did the counting, I realized that this book didn't so much remind me of a good down-home family surviving the crash of the modern world but instead a clan of Christian-Identity members relishing the crash. I know that sounds harsh, but there it is. There is no personality at all in any female in the book. And often they are just referred to as a subordinate group such as saying "the women" did this or "the females" went to do that. In this book, the idea of the Christian male who controls all activities and has the last word in all matters with the surrendered female is laid out in all its sickening splendor. This isn't to say that I disapprove of anyone's religion since I certainly don't even if I don't share it. But having it simply laid out repeatedly as established fact that anyone who isn't Christian deserves what is happening and those not sharing his religious belief simply get a lower priority in saving or helping isn't pretty.
As if all that weren't enough, there is the lack of emotion. Any person, even abnormal ones, are going to have some reaction to big traumatic happenings. In one instance just after the quake and while the world is still going along, their best friends show up. While attending a high school sports activity, the place basically collapses and kills a couple of hundred folks right in front of them and their kids. Now, if you showed up at a friend's house and relayed that story, what do you suppose the reaction would be? Shock, maybe horror and certainly concern for how those kids are, right? Nope. These folks actually sat in their car right outside the death scene, simply assuming everyone was dead, until light then drove straight over for tea and cookies with the Drummonds. And after going from sports to massacre, they immediately transition to small talk and jokes around a cozy wood stove. This is just one of a great many instances in which this story winds up as purely mechanical and has no emotional resonance with charcters that behave more like hard drives.
My bottom line on this book is that it is a great story premise with much potential. It needs a serious edit for mechanical problems. It really needs to be reconsidered in his obvious biases and intolerance for other religons and vastly improve his characterizations for all the characters he personally doesn't see himself in such as the female characters. For those who like to read about the minutiae of how to make a generator out of a spare small engine and want recommendations on which jacket lasts in adverse conditions, this might strike just the right chord.Deep Winter Overview

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Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse: A Novel Review

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Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse: A Novel ReviewWhere to begin on a novel whose title is the barest hint of the wonderful weirdness packed inside? Gischler, best known for his excellent crime capers, here breaks new ground. And I do mean new.
Mortimer Tate has spent the end of the world hiding in a mountain cabin. He hasn't seen anyone for nine years. The first three people he does see, he kills. But really, it wasn't his fault.
Thus begins an adrenaline-soaked, wryly satiric journey through the ashes of America, a world peopled by savages and cannibals and struggling barmen, by rebel armies and mad transvestites, and by the enigmatic Joey Armageddon, whose Sassy A-Go-Go Clubs are the beacon of something a little like civilization. The prose is lean and compelling, and behind all the violence and jokes there's a Vonnegut-esque blend of both love-for and desperation-at all the madness of the world -- Mortimer's and ours.Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse: A Novel Overview

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The Reapers Are the Angels: A Novel Review

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The Reapers Are the Angels: A Novel ReviewWell, this wasn't what I expected at all.
Having last entered the world of zombies in The Forest of Hands and Teeth, given the age of the protagonist (15) and the rather skimpy information on the review copy, I guess was expecting another young adult "message" horror novel. I like that kind of thing, so why not?
I was not expecting this work of art that caught me up and shook me and broke my heart because it is both so beautiful and so sad. Zombies: the new face of magic realism. Who knew?
The language is flawless. It is unobtrusive, but lush and almost lyrical. The pacing, too, flawless. Not a passage drags, nothing wasted. The characters are strong and believable; their motivations make sense; their voices are clear and distinct.
I will not kid you. This book is intense. Temple may be 15, but the life she lives is very adult, and the situations she encounters are gut-wrenching. The book made me cry, more than once; it isn't going to be a good fit for everyone. It's a pretty grim world, and an unflinchingly violent one, but in spite of the monsters it's *not* a conventional horror story. If you come for catharsis, you'll get it, but maybe not the kind you expect. This isn't spine tingling; it's soul twisting. I won't be surprised if reviews are highly divided; those who are looking for conventional horror or are even further afield as I was may not be universally pleased. This is a great book - a masterpiece, maybe - for the *right* reader.
The book left me thoughtful and sad and grateful for what I have. Grateful, too, to have read it. I'm still caught up in the aftermath, having finished it moments before I started writing the review, so it's really too soon to say--but I *think* I may have just found a contender for my shortlist of "favorite books."The Reapers Are the Angels: A Novel Overview

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Lights Out Review

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Lights Out ReviewThis is one of those books that sticks with you. Compels you to think about what these people are going through. His characters are vivid and well thought out. The reality that he spins is concrete and understandable. The range of reactions to this very real threat are believable and don't drift into fantasy.
The basic premise of the book is of a US plunged into chaos following an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack. If you aren't tracking at this point, an EMP attack is the destruction of the electronic infrastructure of the country using nuclear weapons detonated in space. These weapons create an EMP that fry anything connected to the power grid and anything with complex electronics. Cars Dead. Computers Dead. Most of the things we take for granted are just switched off. This causes a cascading failure that effects everyone in the country. Needless to say this is the end of the world as they knew it. Are you ready to fend for yourself ... and your family?
Bobby Ann Mason once said that the best stories occurred when you take ordinary people and place them in extraordinary situations. LIGHTS OUT deals with a group of ordinary people who band together and form a community in the aftermath of this national disaster. The ethics of self reliance and hard work are that are missing from some arenas of modern-life are alive in this volume. The relationships are natural, they feel organic and not forced. The level of drama never takes me out of the story and aside from some lucky pre-planning and coincidental hobbies there is nothing that I think is contrived about the setting or events. I would like to have seen some greater focus on the realities beyond the community but the outside world is addressed all be it briefly. I hope to see other stories from this "world."
Having read David's work online for years, I can tell you that this guy is a writer. He produces and he learns. This is an amazing first book and I look forward to future efforts from him. Maybe a book about two guys named DJ and Gabe will be availible on Amazon this time next year. We can only hope.Lights Out Overview

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Ex-Heroes Review

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Ex-Heroes ReviewEx-Heroes, the debut novel from Peter Clines, offers a new spin on the typical zombie story. Set in modern times, a zombie outbreak has ravaged the earth and only a handful of superheroes have kept the situation in Los Angeles from deteriorating into total chaos. Reeling from losses in their own community, a band of heroes has established a fortified safe zone in Hollywood to help whatever survivors they find. Unfortunately so has a much larger group of gang members, who have some deadly tricks up their sleeves.
Now, mixing superheroes and zombies isn't an entirely new concept, but unlike Marvel Zombies, Ex-Heroes takes the idea seriously and is a story you can actually believe. Ex-Heroes reads like a mix of Watchmen (or maybe Heroes) and Land of the Dead. It's more of a big screen movie type story than the typical tale of survival horror, but I mean that in the best possible way. Clines's story of very human, very flawed heroes trying to maintain order in a post-apocalyptic situation seems very realistic and would make a terrific movie. I love how the book is split between "then" and "now" chapters, with the "then" chapters told from the perspective of a different hero and chronicling the developing crisis.
Clines has come up with a fascinating cast of characters who, despite being superheroes, all seem like real people. I also loved the pace of the book, the believable dialogue, the black humor (a running contest to see who bagged the most famous zombie, for example), and the unexpected plot twists that never seemed forced or clichéd. I'm already anxious for a sequel.
Ex-Heroes is a fantastic superhero novel, a fantastic zombie novel, and just a great story altogether. You know those books where you're only a few pages in and you realize "oh yeah, this author knows what s/he's doing"? They're few and far between, but Ex-Heroes is definitely one of them. If you're a fan of superheroes or zombies (or better yet, both), Ex-Heroes is a must-read.
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