Crimson Phoenix (Victoria Emerson #1), By John Gilstrap ~ 3.0 Stars

Tags

Adult Fiction, Apocalyptic Fiction, Suspense

Thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Publishing for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Release Date: February 23rd, 2021

320 Pages

Synopsis: Victoria Emerson is a congressional member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the state of West Virginia. Her aspirations have always been to help her community and to avoid the ambitious power plays of her peers in Washington, D.C. Then Major Joseph McCrea appears on her doorstep and uses the code phrase Crimson Phoenix, meaning this is not a drill. The United States is on the verge of nuclear war. Victoria must accompany McCrea to a secure bunker. She cannot bring her family. 

A single mother, Victoria refuses to abandon her three teenage sons. Denied access to the bunker, they nonetheless survive the nuclear onslaught that devastates the country. The land is nearly uninhabitable. Electronics have been rendered useless. Food is scarce. Millions of scared and ailing people await aid from a government unable to regroup, much less organize a rescue from the chaos.

Victoria devotes herself to reestablishing order—only to encounter the harsh realities required of a leader dealing with desperate people…

I have to be honest and say, despite me being a fan of John Gilstrap, Crimson Phoenix left me frustrated. The premise was exciting, but the actual story wound up being surprisingly formulaic. For the most part, I found the characters to be rather flat and uninspiring, and the dialogue awkward and a few times, even cringy. The chapters alternate between three povs: the stereotypical politicians in the bunker and the sketchy soldiers who are supposed to be protecting them; Victoria, the major and her two youngest boys; and her older son Adam and his girlfriend who are attempting to meet up with his family at a predetermined rendezvous point. While I appreciate a strong female character, Victoria came off a little too perfect and almost robotic at times, and as for the other characters, well, I just finished this last night and I’m already forgetting their names. For all that, I did keep reading, mainly because I kept believing things would improve, but alas, it didn’t. It wasn’t all bad though. The breakout of the war was well done and given the current political climate completely believable. The apocalyptic landscape was also well written and very descriptive. But in the end, there just wasn’t anything or anyone memorable here, and I think the best word I can come up with to describe my feelings is “meh.” However, my opinion is very much in the minority as I’ve been seeing mostly 4-5 star reviews, so if you are a fan of Gilstrap, or enjoy apocalyptic fiction, I recommend you check this out.

Feral ~ By James DeMonaco & B.K. Evenson – 3.0 Stars

Tags

Adult Fiction, Apocalyptic Fiction, Horror

Thanks to NetGalley and Anchor Books for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Release Date: April 4th, 2017

256 Pages

Synopsis: From James DeMonaco, the writer/director of The Purge film franchise, comes the provocative and terrifying last stand of a lone outpost of women in the wake of a deadly pandemic.

Allie Hilts was still in high school when a fire at a top-secret research facility released an airborne pathogen that quickly spread to every male on the planet, killing most. Allie witnessed every man she ever knew be consumed by fearsome symptoms: scorching fevers and internal bleeding,madness and uncontrollable violence. The world crumbled around her. No man was spared, and the few survivors were irrevocably changed. They became disturbingly strong, aggressive, and ferocious. Feral.

Three years later, Allie has joined a group of hardened survivors in an isolated, walled-in encampment. Outside the guarded walls the ferals roam free, and hunt. Allie has been noticing troubling patterns in the ferals’ movements, and a disturbing number of new faces in the wild. Something catastrophic is brewing on the horizon and time is running out. The ferals are coming, and there is no stopping them.

Fair warning: Feral is not for the faint of heart. Given that one of the authors is James Demonaco writer/director of The Purge films, this shouldn’t come as a complete shock. There were some scenes though that even had me wincing and saying “Ew!” The first part of the book starts out strong as the reader sees how Allie deals with the end of the world as she knows it. Just a teenager, she witnesses the unimaginable and in order to protect herself and her 12-year-old sister Kim, has to do some horrible things in order to survive. As the story flashes forward three years, you see a much more hardened woman. She’s badass, and impulsive, yet still maintains her humanity somehow. Allie is really the best part of the book and she’s the main reason why I kept reading. Unfortunately, I ran into a few other issues. Feral alternates between first and third person POVs as well as between several different characters. While this style didn’t make things confusing, it did make the story rather choppy. I also wish Allie’s relationship with her sister Kim had been more developed. The other characters were unoriginal and also lacking in development and I wound up not connecting with any of them. And finally, while the book started out with a unique twist on the whole “end-of-the-world because idiotic scientists are messing around with something they shouldn’t be” trope, by the middle of the book things had become pretty predictable and I saw the ending coming a mile away. The action scenes though are masterfully done and the the book at under 300 pages is a quick read. Overall, Feral is an okay story that fans of gory horror may enjoy.

Faller ~ By Will McIntosh – 4.0 Stars

Tags

Adult Fiction, Adventure, Apocalyptic Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Books for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

352 Pages

Synopsis: Day One

No one can remember anything–who they are, family and friends, or even how to read. Reality has fragmented and Earth consists of islands of rock floating in an endless sky. Food, water, electricity–gone, except for what people can find, and they can’t find much.

Faller’s pockets contain tantalizing clues: a photo of himself and a woman he can’t remember, a toy soldier with a parachute, and a mysterious map drawn in blood. With only these materials as a guide, he makes a leap of faith from the edge of the world to find the woman and set things right.

He encounters other floating islands, impossible replicas of himself and others, and learns that one man hates him enough to take revenge for actions that Faller can’t even remember.

Faller’s premise is definitely unique, which is why I was drawn to it to begin with, and for the most part the story lives up to it. The chapters alternate between the man who calls himself Faller, and a man named Peter Sandoval, a Nobel Prize winning physicist who’s developed a technology which could literally save the world. Peter’s chapters are set in a not so distant future from our own, where World War III has broken out over depleted energy sources. These are truly frightening because you can see this coming to pass. Faller’s chapters are set in the aftermath of the mysterious events that led to everyone’s memories wiped and the survivors living on all these different fractured “worlds”. These narratives seem unrelated at first, but they soon begin to converge much like a giant jigsaw puzzle, answering the most burning questions including who Faller really is. While I don’t read a lot of science fiction, Will McIntosh is one of my favorite authors in this genre because I know I can always count on something completely different from what’s already out there and Faller is a perfect example of why he’s such an appealing author. While the world-building here is incredibly detailed and takes center stage, the story itself is filled with characters who are relatable and believable. What kept this from being a perfect read for me were several questions that were never answered. For example: No matter what world Faller landed on, everyone spoke English. And, everyones autobiographical memories were wiped clean, but they do remember how to perform functions like opening cans and using weapons. They don’t know how to drive vehicles or read though. This made no sense to me. There’s a few other burning questions I have, but I can’t really list them here without including spoilers. While I was frustrated by the lack of logical explanations concerning these, the rest of the book is so well-written that this didn’t spoil my overall enjoyment of it. Faller is a real page-turner that looks at everything from quantum physics to cloning, singularities, bio-weaponry, the ethics of using this technology and of course, the apocalypse. Somehow, McIntosh manages to juggle all these topics without slowing down the story one iota. If you’re a fan of science fiction and you haven’t been introduced to the incredible mind of Will McIntosh, I urge you to try him. 

 

The Fireman ~ By Joe Hill – 5.0 Stars

Tags

Adult Fiction, Apocalyptic Fiction, Horror, Plagues, Relationships, Religion

Thank you Edelweiss and William Morrow for providing an e-Arc in exchange for an honest review.

Release Date: May 17th, 2016

Synopsis: No one knows exactly when it bagan or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies–before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live–at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too…if she can live long enough to deliver the child.

Convinced his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads–armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted…and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.

In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn The Fireman’s secrets before her life–and that of her unborn child–goes up in smoke.

I’ve been practically foaming at the mouth since I heard about The Fireman last year. Being the Stephen King fan that I am, it’s little wonder that I’d also become a devotee of his son who has definitely inherited his dad’s writing prowess. When I requested this from Edelweiss I honestly didn’t think I had a chance of getting my hands on a e-Arc. If I had children I think I would have given up my first born for a coveted approval. I was even eyeing my neighbor’s oldest kid as a possible offering. Thankfully I was approved and it never came to that.

After I calmed down and stopped screaming I immediately stopped reading my other three books and focused solely on this. I actually finished it over a week ago, but it’s taken me this long to write a coherent review. When I first read the synopsis I was picturing something like this in regards to John Rookwood, aka The Fireman:

He’s actually much more like Constantine, right down to the British accent.

And like Constantine, John is a complicated man. He’s not perfect by any means, but he’s one of the most interesting characters I’ve read about in quite awhile.

And then there’s Harper. I’m going to be honest and say her Mary Poppins obsession may get on some readers nerves, but I thought it added even more charm to an already likable character. Harper is a woman who has a strong moral compass. She doesn’t wear religion on her sleeve like some others in the book do, but she’s courageous, loyal, compassionate and does her best to protect others when she can. The relationship that develops between her and John does so slowly over the course of the novel. While it plays a part in what’s going on, the main focus of the story is the Dragonscale disease and how people react to it. Joe Hill, as in his previous books, does a masterful job of taking ordinary people and climbing into their heads to expose the dark layers that lie within. While you have heroes like Harper, John, and their friends, and villains like Jakob and his twisted buddies on the Cremation Squad, there’s also perfectly ordinary people that any one of us can relate to. Some choose the right path, no matter how difficult it might be, but others struggle, and still more find the darkness within them taking over and truly making them monsters. It goes without saying that the world building is incredible, and the story never drags which is pretty incredible for an almost 800 page book. I finished it in three days which is a testimony to how captivating the story is. At its heart The Fireman is an epic tale of love and redemption amidst unimaginable horror and in my opinion is Joe Hill’s best novel yet. While we’re not quite through half of 2016, the last few months have already been filled with fantastic books, but this is definitely going to the top of my list of favorite books for this year. So, do I recommend this? HELL YEAH!

If you’re already a fan of Joe Hills, The Fireman will make you an even more passionate member of his fandom. If you’re new to his writing and like horror and apocalyptic thrillers I beg you to pick this up. I guarantee you won’t be sorry!

A Lovely Way to Burn (Plague Times Trilogy #1) ~ By Louise Welsh – 2.5 Stars

Tags

Adult Fiction, Apocalyptic Fiction, Mystery

Thank you NetGalley and Quercus for providing an e-Arc in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis: A pandemic called “The Sweats” is sweeping the globe. London is a city in crisis. Hospitals begin to fill with the dead and dying, but Stevie Flint is convinced that the sudden death of  her boyfriend Dr. Simon Sharkey was not from natural causes. As roads out of London become gridlocked with people fleeing infection, Stevie search for Simon’s killers takes her in the opposite direction, into the depths of a dying city and a race with death.

I had such high hopes for A Lovely Way to Burn but I just found it to be a “meh” read. While I thought the premise was interesting with it’s combination of a plague story and murder mystery, as an actual completed work the two themes never came together. Part of the problem was I found Stevie’s determination to discover who was behind Simon’s death admirable, but ultimately unbelievable. Society is literally coming apart at the seams as more and more people fall victim to “The Sweats”. The public is panicking and the government and medical establishment are pretty much helpless in the face of this plague. Stevie becomes ill but somehow she survives. We’re supposed to believe that instead of fleeing London for somewhere safer, she’s going to put herself in further danger by investigating the death of a man whom she had entered into a recent relationship with and didn’t really know much about. I also had a difficult time connecting with Stevie as the protagonist. She’s likable enough, but I thought many of her actions just didn’t make sense, and her reactions to the larger catastrophe unfolding downright annoying. What did work was the the actual plague story, which I feel the author should have focused on more. The murder mystery is solved at the end, so it’s left me wondering if the next story will be a pure apocalyptic novel. Overall I found A Lovely Way to Burn to be a disjointed story burdened by a contrived mystery and some rather awkward dialogue. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest of the trilogy.