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I’ve been wanting to read One Second After by William R. Forstchen for a while. I finally got tired of waiting for it to become available at my local library, so I got the audiobook and just finished it today.

The story takes place in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina and begins on “The Day” when an electro-magnetic pulse fries anything containing electronics, and cuts the townspeople off from all forms of communication or contact with anyone not in their immediate vicinity. Most of the story covers the next two months, as they struggle to survive with no outside aid and no technology newer than about 30 years old.

I’ve read a lot of post-apocalyptic books that had an element of “Huh?”, where something just didn’t feel right, or I wondered if the plot would really play out like it was written. I didn’t have that problem with One Second After. Because Forstchen intended the book to be a warning that our government is not doing enough to protect the nation from EMP, he didn’t pull any punches in describing what life would be like without our electronics or electrical grid.

Hundreds die after only a few weeks, thousands after a few months, and 90% of the town is dead in a year. After just a few weeks they’re already debating whether to slaughter all the pet dogs in the town for food. There are rivalries, and alliances, with nearby towns, college kids turned militia, and a major battle with a gang of cannibalistic cultists.

Basically it reminded me a lot of the TV show Jericho, which has a very similar premise of a small town cut off from the rest of the country, not really knowing what’s going on and having to survive on their own.

It’s a little preachy on the dangers of EMP, and there are a couple of cheesy moments where someone spontaneously breaks out singing the Star Spangled Banner, but overall, I really liked it. It’s not the kind of book that I can read over and over, like The Road or The Stand, but it was good, and I’d highly recommend it for any fan of near-term post-apocalypse stories.

I just finished the audiobook of Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and really enjoyed it.  It’s a fairly short young adult novel that takes place in the months following a world-wide catastrophe caused by the moon being knocked out of its orbit by a passing meteor.  This causes tsunami, earthquakes and volcanoes sprouting up all over the world.  None of this affects our main characters directly, but it does cause a breakdown of civilization, complete with no more food deliveries, or gas and electricity.

The story is told first-person by Miranda, a sixteen year old girl, writing in her diary. We get an entry about every day or so, with the occasional break of a few days. When things start to look like they could go bad, Miranda’s mother is smart enough to stock up on food and other supplies.  This turns out to be just about the last food they’ll have available for most of the story.  Through Miranda’s diary, we then get to hear how the family survives through the winter, made much worse than normal by skies grayed with dust from volcanoes.

I did like the book, but whether on purpose or not, it avoids what I would expect to be the more realistic aspects of this kind of situation.  I mean it’s clearly a young adult book, and so it feels a little soft.

For example, Miranda and her family are slowly starving to death as they try to stretch their food supplies through the winter.  They’re skipping meals to make their food last longer, but they consider going back to school when it opens, and waste time and energy on things like going ice skating.  They did spend a lot of time preparing stocks of firewood, but there’s not one mention of trying to go hunting or even fishing.  They live near woods so there must be wild animals of some sort nearby, or a stream with fish in it.  They never even get a gun for their own protection.  Though it turns out they wouldn’t need one, because there’s barely any mention of looting or any violence at all.  If I was in a town full of starving people I’d expect theft, looting, even murder as people did anything to stay alive.

In one scene near the end Miranda comments about how many houses she sees with no signs of life, and she mentions that some of the people left, but that some must have died of illness.  I was screaming at the cd player in my car that if they didn’t starve to death, there’s probably food in those houses.  And at the very least, the dead bodies themselves would be preserved by the cold, though I guess those kinds of ideas wouldn’t be in an 8th grade novel.

So overall, it’s not The Road, but it was very enjoyable.  The author has written a companion novel, The Dead and the Gone, which takes place in the same universe during the same catastrophe, though it focuses on how a group of characters in New York City survive.  That one is supposed to be “grittier” so hopefully I’ll like it even more.

So after nearly six weeks and six hundred pages, I finally finished Malevil, and my overall opinion of it is that it mostly sucked. I’m looking at the Amazon page for it now, and out of 17 reviews, 16 of them gave it five stars, and I’m wondering if we all read the same book.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for years; I always thought it would be interesting to read a post-nuclear war survival story from another culture’s perspective.  What I didn’t expect was that that culture would be so rural that the fact that civilization had been destroyed didn’t change their daily lives very much.  The story takes place in rural France around 1977, but some of the characters didn’t even have electricity before “the day it happened”.  All had knowledge of farming, masonry, taking care of animals and all the other skills that you would expect characters to have to learn or re-learn in a modern post-apocalyptic novel.

The story takes place between a castle and a town.  There is no scavenging, no treks to explore nearby cities for useful items, nothing even resembling converting a car to a wagon by removing the engine or any other use of “old world technology”. There is brief mention of the fact that the war was “unexpected” but that’s it.  I don’t think the words “United States” or “Soviet Union” appear anywhere in the book.  Aside from a few pages of worry about fallout, the entire story could have taken place in 1877 rather than 1977 with very little change.

For example, when the town threatens to send a priest to oversee Malevil (the castle), they elect the main character Abbe of Malevil in an effort to claim ecclesiastical superiority.  As if anyone, when faced with the possible extinction of mankind, would give a shit about who claimed to be a priest and what power they supposedly wielded because of it.

I wanted so much to like this book but just couldn’t. Maybe the fact that it’s a translation didn’t help, or maybe I just don’t get the French way of thinking or doing things.  But unless it’s your life goal to read anything and everything post-apocalyptic, I’d skip this one.