One Second After

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Dystopian / Forstchen, William R.	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf

One man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war based upon an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) weapon that will send America back to the Dark Ages.

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Grim but gripping 'end of the world' stuff submitted by hathaway1066 on July 22, 2013, 8:55pm This is very much a TEOTWAWKI / prepper lit story. An EMP (electro magnetic pulse) of unknown origin hits the U.S. and leave the hero's small town on it's own. How he leads them and deal with various difficulties (lack of medicines, arrival of big-city refugees, and marauding bad-guys) while trying to still be a dad, and well, with a few other things thrown in, make for compelling reading. Not a masterpiece of insightful character development/language use, etc. but food for thought in terms of just what our civilization does for us and couldn't do under worst case scenarios.

The bit about the old age home was powerful stuff.

Satisfyingly apocalyptic. submitted by eknapp on September 23, 2013, 10:48am My favorite opening sentence ever of a book: "The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault." So much goodness there. I love that even if the character is NOT at fault--maybe--he's the kind of guy who sure as hell COULD be and we can't wait to find out just what the heck is going on.

The opening sentence of THIS book: "John Matherson lifted the plastic bag off the counter."

*cough*

So yeah, that was strike one. Strike two was when I realized that the foreword was an arm-waving fear-mongering piece of pap written by none other than Newt Freaking Gingrich.

At that point I was just looking for an excuse to quit reading, but--amazingly--there was no strike three. Forstchen recovered the ball, crossed the neutral zone, drove the lane and split the uprights.

Okay, it's not contending for book-of-the-year. His prose doesn't get any better and the book is comprised mostly of 1)dry lectures on history, nation-building, public health, and introductory law, and 2)maudlin monologues about noble sacrifice and conservative heroism (LOTS of the latter).

What can I say, the dry lectures were interesting. Forstchen digs into EMPs and demonstrates just how dependent we are on abundant power and easy transportation. He exposes the pamperedness of 21st century first-worlders and posits some pretty convincing die-off scenarios and survivor conflicts.

All told, it didn't hold a candle to Lucifer's Hammer or World War Z but it was still mentally delicious for an apocalypse nut like me.