One of the things that bugged me about earlier books was that it not only felt isolated (i.e. no in-story linkage to previous entries), but that each tale felt rather lackluster. In the fire one, the rains come and it’s all over. Things never really seemed to “go” anywhere.
In this, and the previous book, Tom Abrahams is starting to interweave the stories and provide an overall plot. I don’t know if this was the intention from the beginning or if his editors/fans/or internal voice told him to switch it up, but I’m grateful (and since this story no longer opens with saying you can read them in any order, I tend to think it was a late course-change).
Affliction spends time following the lives of our usual characters as they deal with the devastation of a plague, and at the same time, starts to peel back the layers revealing what’s been going on behind the scenes to create this world of endless apocalypses. We also begin to find out what links our characters together (and there’s even a nod, and some humanization of the poor woman who seems to die at the beginning of every book).
This is an entry you’ll definitely want to read/listen to after the others, but it’s one of the better ones in term of overall plot and how interesting the “surviving” parts of the tale were.
As usual, great narration from Kevin Pierce.