I take a perverse pleasure in post-apocalyptic fiction, especially boxed sets and series. My favorites include alien invasion or world cataclysm and having just lived through the pandemic I was interested to see how the idea of a world plague would be handled.
These books follow the adventures of Mike and Bryce, two men who worked together selling radio advertising until a killer virus began to decimate the world’s population and throw society into chaos.
There are various other plot lines running concurrently with the main story involving cunning scientists and military personnel who plot to control the virus or the population for their own benefit.
The narrator has a warm, folksy voice that makes listening easy. He doesn’t try to do character voices but it’s usually very clear who’s speaking.
The characters are not terribly complex, and the only character who really undergoes a transformation in the course of the story is Mike who is rather meek in the beginning of the story but seems to find himself in the crisis that unfolds. He develops true leadership skills and courage. Other people fall apart and although all the characters are forced to make difficult decisions and are led on perilous journeys, most of them are left unresolved at the end of book three.
The author is making the statement in book one that most people are unprepared for any emergency. They have no plan, no supplies put by and would react violently to the threat posed by a siege like the one in the book. The government and military were also unprepared and unable to maintain order. I found that laughable given that we’re just coming out of a period of international crisis due to the pandemic and we actually managed to do it without societal collapse.
The second book was about the period of time about six months after the virus had played out. Survivors banded together, some good people and some bad, forming small units and pooling resources and scavenging to get along.
In the third book the group we were following broke up into smaller groups and started traveling to try to find their families. Throughout, there was a definite tone of disapproval for people without guns and the knowledge of how to use them and people who had not been prepping for the end of the world event. There was evident distrust of scientists and a bleak view of human nature.
Still it was an entertaining tale with evidently more volumes to come.