Tag Archives: apocalyptic fiction

Wake Me after the Apocalypse

Some books have hooks that just get me, or maybe Amazon is good at advertising. Whatever. Anyway, this book‘s hook is that Joanna the protagonist wakes up from cryosleep after 200 years only to find that there’s been a cave-in, and she alone has survived out of her group of a thousand people. The backstory, doled out in alternating chapters, is that a comet was about to hit the earth, but with enough warning that lots of bunkers of 1,000 people each were set up throughout America to allow humanity to survive the darkness and the desolation, via centuries of sleep thanks to recently successful cryonics technology.

I mean, Joanna’s personal backstory is also doled out through those alternating chapters, but that’s the gist of it. Cryosleep to avoid disaster, wake up to completely different disaster. So… obviously she’s going to meet other survivors. For one thing, there’s no reason to believe all the bunkers were destroyed just because hers was. But, insofar as this is the first book in a series, I was looking for less exposition and relationships and stuff, more raw survival and maybe mystery solving.[1]

What I got was… about half a book of those alternating backstory chapters, enough to get me well and truly tired of them. Then, just as the book I was looking for got started, the back 40% of it was instead chock full of people again, already. Ugh. It’s not that the story Rivet wrote was bad, it just was not at all what I wanted. Put a different way [that overstates the case of what this book actually is], I’d like to read these YA books and have them be less about Team Jacob versus Team Edward and more about Team Bella.

Anyway, if the second book is available at the Kindle lending library, I’ll borrow it eventually as I did this one. If it is not, I’m pretty sure I will neither buy nor download it. So… yeah.

[1] After all, just because the scientists believed it would be an extinction level event doesn’t mean it definitely would be. 99.999% death rate, we’d still bounce back[2].
[2] …well, maybe not bounce.

Blind Fury

As I probably mentioned the last time I read one of these, I bought a bunch of really cheap books, including really cheap series of books, on my Kindle over the past year and change. A fact about books that come in 6 to 8 volumes for $2-3 is that they’re likely, especially in the apocalyptic fiction subgenre, to be the kind of propulsive book that expects and nearly demands that you read the whole thing in about seventeen minutes without pausing for breath.

This unfortunately does not interact well with me using them as a “well, you only have your phone with you, this is your safety net” book and taking a good eight months to read one of them. What’s worse is, they’re really all just one long book, and the division markers are pretty arbitrary. Cliffhanger, maybe, but there’s no apparent thematic or character arc rationale for the splits between books. Of course, if I’d waited to read the whole thing before writing a review, that probably would have been a worse choice? Hard to know.

Anyway, Blind Fury starts out with the world (or at least Denmark’s slice of it) not quite collapsed and depopulated, but certainly on its way. The main tensions of the story are a) keeping the pregnant lady alive, while b) pushing the immune characters closer together so they can band up to [insert future plot here] but also c) dodging the shadowy and probably evil government agents who want to dissect them to save the world. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also a Renfield[1] who is either in contact with the precipitating force that put the crack in the sky that turns people into blind rage zombies, or is schizophrenic, or most likely both.

Yay, apocalypse!

[1] You know, the crazy dude who serves the bad guy(s)

Blind Rage

Since October, I have been buying cheap (or often free) Kindle books. Like, 99c for seven books kind of thing. I’ve spent maybe $30, and increased my digital library by hundreds of titles. Are most of them garbage? Okay, probably. But it gives me something to read when I don’t have anything but my phone handy.

The first of these books that I’ve actually read is Blind Rage, the first volume of an eight book series called Under the Breaking Sky. It steals heavily from Cell, and is otherwise about what you’d expect out of a not quite zombified airport thriller. Set in Denmark and with maybe five or so main characters, it tells the story of the day a weird hole appeared in the sky that causes anyone who looks at it to go blind and enraged, such that they hunt down anyone they can hear, to rip them apart or bash them to pieces. (But not each other.) Then the thing in the sky goes away, until it comes back again 12 hours later. And again. And again.

So, I lied earlier though. A small percentage of the population is unaffected. Most of the main characters are this type, and the book (and probably the series) is entirely about them trying to stay alive, and maybe eventually trying to figure out how this is even happening? Beats me, and I’m not holding my breath. It’s an apocalypse, I’m just along for the ride.