One Second After: A Review

William Forstchen’s One Second After is a reality-based apocalypse-in-progress novel that is set in the mountains of Western North Carolina after an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP)  attack sets the U.S. back to 1850s level technology. 

William H. Forstchen has a PHD in Military History, and the History of Technology, and like our novel’s hero, a History Professor at Montreat College. His earlier works focused on the American Civil War, and the U.S. involvement in World War 2.

This novel is not the first novel to feature an EMP burst, but because of its mainstream political connections of the author, had probably done the most to popularize the concept.  With the detonation of hydrogen bomb in outer space, gamma ray burst start a chain reaction (The Compton Effect) which  creates a huge electromagnetic pulse that according the novels scenario will wipe out most electronics and melt many much of the electrical grid.  Airplanes, which are now almost exclusively fly-by-wire, use electronics will come crashing out of the sky.  The author in interviews repeats assertions that one year after the event 90% of Americans could be dead.

The novel  takes place in Black Mountain, North Carolina.  The college that our hero teaches at is based on the the school where the author works-  Montreat College. The hero, like the author, teaches history there.  The hero is a retired Colonel; the author studied military history.  I think you see my point.

As for Black Mountain, to my mind the actual layout as described seems to be the somewhat more restrictive terrain a little bit East of the town.  In any case, Black Mountain sits on Route 40 is just a little east of the Asheville, North Carolina.  Interstate 70, is one of the major east-west highways in the United States.  Black Mountain is a major choke point.

Approach to Black Mountain, NC

In any case, very quickly into the novel we get the now typical  EMP event.  Nukes go off in the sky, and everything with even the tiniest bit of electronics stops working.  People start walking.

What I continue to fail to understand is why all these stories have all the newer vehicles electronics being knocked out.  As I noted an earlier:

The Official Report goes into details as to the immediate effect on vehicles. Automobiles that were turned off showed no damage, automobiles that were running cut off 10% of the time, but were immediately able to restart after coasting to a stop. In the case of trucks, one of the thirteen tested did have to be towed [p113]. While obviously disruptive, this is a far cry from the thousands immediately stranded on the highways. Further, it notes that the effects on most electronic medical devices would be limited.

As noted in the report, the primary damage from an EMP attack would be to knock out the electrical system. This would be devastating of course, but requires a different set of protective measures than trying to build a Faraday cage around your car. The books website does reference the report on a separate tab.

I have not seen the author make any correction on this fairly important point.  And if many of our automobiles will still function, one has to certainly hold out the prospects that many other electronic devices will also function.  This portion of the effect would certainly be highly disruptive. But if you are going to risk a massive retaliatory full nuclear return strike, you really need to do more than be highly disruptive.  Hopefully the Iranians will be more impressed by the actual experimental results than the results portrayed by various novelists.  Given the similarities of the EMP in the opening sequences of the story, one wonders if the author was influenced by the earlier online versions of Lights Out.

The early parts of the novel involve getting the local town organized and situated.   Our hero, as a respected learned man, is asked to be on the new town council.  Eventually he is put in charge of the defenses of the town. Since most people have very little in the way off food they do their best to round up what supplies there are to be had, and institute a strict no-nonsense rule of law.  There is a lot of hand wringing along the way, but within a few weeks they are having public executions of criminals,

While the local level goings on of the disaster are fairly well thought out, the greater story of what is occurring in Western North Carolina is a bit shaky.   One suspects that the author is a big fan of the novel Lucifer’s Hammer, because the books finale is set up to look an awful lot like the ending conclusion of that book.  The bad guys all round themselves up, and walk from Charlotte, into the mountains, to attack Asheville.  Why does this happen?  Because that is where the author lives.  Really.  As I have discussed before, there is almost no good reason why, if you have a big shambling horde of desperadoes, you would want to walk through rough channeling terrain into the face of gun fire, when there are all sorts of small urban areas up and down the I-85 corridor that could be yours for the taking.  The very idea of a crazed hoard of people in panicked flight from the cities actually goes back to the days of nuclear warfare, when there was some thought that you could get out of town before the Soviet bombers showed up.  It was picked up later by the economic collapse folks, and has since turned into commonly accepted wisdom.  It is so commonplace in fiction that I have not seen a single person talking about this book question the idea that  a group of folks from the sprawling mass that is Charlotte, would pick up and walk into the relatively barren mountains.

The author also has a tendency to view the world through politicized lenses. This tends to make a lot of the characters rather flat.  The book wastes time taking pot-shots at the government and residents of Asheville.  The straight-laced hero is very dismissive of the hippie-commune type of people, and even makes note that they won’t last long.   I am not sure why he thinks the hippy crowd would be any worse off than anyone else.  The true hippies have more experience living a minimalist lifestyle than most Americans.  If he was picking on some over-weight Wiccans, I could see his point.  But even there, I don’t see how overweight Wiccans would be worse off than your typical overweight Americans- other than of course the fact that they don’t have our hero-author’s beneficial guidance.

This novel tends to be popular within the prepper-survivalist crowd.  Given the positive treatment of the subject of stockpiling some emergency supplies in preparation for a disaster, and the benign treatment that the few prepared folks up in the hills get from our Hero,  that popularity is understandable.

The question is, does it deserve its popularity?  I have two thoughts.

If you think of it as a simulation of an event as it might actually occur -  A conclusion that is reinforced by the way that the book is presented:  forward by Newt Gingrich, touting of authors technical background, etcetera – than the book is a disaster.  The EMP strike’s effects, and, the bizarre flight from city,  the final penultimate battle with the bad guys, all appear to be derived more from earlier fictional sources than historical precedence.   That the book’s main hero is such a close alter ego to the author goes a long way toward explaining the preternatural skill in navigating the small town’s problems.  Some of the after-collapse events seem to rather neatly fall into line with the authors political beliefs.   A belief structure that might be appropriate for national level politics in a functioning nation, but don’t have too much relevance to small town disaster governance.

However, and a big however, if you compare it to similar novelizations of possible disasters, such as the previously noted Lucifer’s Hammer, it stands up reasonably well.  It brings up a lot of realistic and heart wrenching concerns that many apocalypses-in-progress novels ignore.  It doesn’t talk about the old people dying; it takes you on a walk through an old folk’s home, abandoned by most of the staff, and with the stench of death in the air.   It talks about putting saw dust, and other “extenders” into the community food, to make it a little more filling.

How many will we lose?” Charlie asked?

“When?”

“You said the curve is going to start going up again. How many do we lose in two or three months?”

“One-third to one-half....” (p234).

The farms don’t have their fuel and fertilizers, and the gardens take too long to get up and running to the level needed.

I am going to switch my usual order of review progression and start with the descriptive (not qualitative) ratings as a way to come to a conclusion on my thoughts of this novel. The range is 1 to 7 with 7 being high, which allows for the convenient mid-point of 4.

Readability is an assessment of how hard is the novel to get through.  Short page-turning thrillers zoom buy, literary works with lots of hidden symbolism maybe not so much.   The novel is not a page turner.  There is a fair amount of wasted time, with a lot of fairly lengthy scenarios that don’t really have a whole lot of payback.  For an “established” author the verbiage is rather clunky.  But by the standards of the genre, it is not entirely unreasonable.   I am going to put it exactly in the middle at a four.

Realism (which I occasionally refer to as grittiness) is an assessment of how closely one could personally associate with the action of the book.  Does it feel real, could you see yourself, or someone you know with these problems?   I do not count the various pros and cons of the actual disaster scenario so much as the reaction to the events.

It’s pretty real.  The success of the hero-author in the story may have a little bit of wish fulfillment going on, but the problems seem very real.  Some of the nice people die because nobody thought to make advance preparations.  There are no magic bullets; ordinary folks are forced to take unusual measures to survive.  I rated it in my review roundups as a 6, and I think that is where I will keep it.

So did I like the novel?  Yes, I did.  I don't rate it as highly as some folks, but it is a good read.

The old folks home, the town pulling together to survive difficult times, makes for some compelling reading, and outweigh the occasional slow pacing.

Author with daughter (from his book website)

Grid Down Reality Bites: A Review

Bruce "Buckshot Hemming and Sara Freeman's Grid Down Reality Bites is an EMP-based (electromagnetic pulse) apocalypse in progress novel set in a near current United States.  The primary areas of focus are Madison, Wisconsin, Southern Minnesota, and Northern California  with the primary large urban area featured (escaped from) being Madison Wisconsin.  It is stated to be the (very long) first part of a trilogy.

"Buckshot" Hemming, based out of Gackle North Dakota, manufactures snares, and related educational books videos that deal with wilderness survival situations.  I have not seen a lot on Sara Freeman, so she may have been a professional writer/editor who helped him to put his book together.  Early, introductory portions of the novel were published online as Green Death to the World and do not credit her.  Mr. Hemming, based on his online musings, appears to have a trappers traditional disdained for wolf-loving and fur-phobic, principled vegetarian folks.  We see allot on these subjects in the novel.

Madison Wisconsin is one of those unlikely popular locations for a collapse novel.  In what was my first full review on this website we have seen it in some detail in the slow collapse novel of Michelle Widgen's But Not For Long.

As with most EMP novels, the collapse happens virtually instantaneously.  I have always had a bit of a problem with these violent global, all-encompassing, fast collapses.  I am willing to listen to contrary viewpoints, but the few details of actual collapse situations that you get almost always have a little bit of a lead time before the violent anarchy begins:  Instantaneous looting, yes;  Crazed killings, no.

To illustrate from a real world  example from a very good interview by Selco at SHTF School:

Survival of women during SHTF
Selco, SHTF School 9 April 2012

Una begins to describe her situation:

My first and worst concern was what is gonna happen with my kids, I had two toddlers, and I did not have any clue what is gonna happen, or even what is gonna look like when hell broke lose. We did not want to believe it could happen. We heard the sound of big guns miles away and stories of violence, rape and murder but everything looked so peaceful.

At the beginning, actually right before everything started during my meetings with my friends and colleagues at work we discussed the deteriorating situation, and pretty soon I found myself faced with important decision: is it worth to send my kids to some more “secure” region or to some relatives to neighboring country, or keep them with me, and wait what happens

I never had question am I going to leave this place, I found it normal to stay in my city, with husband, in my house. Looking back now I know it was big mistake.

Note this is at the leadup to the siege of Sarajevo.  This is a war.  There were Yugoslavians-Bosnians alive at the time who would have seen the inter-ethnic conflict that went on during World War 2.  Yet people were still slow to grasp the dire situation.  In the case of an EMP-attack (if it worked), or any other type of collapse scenario for that matter, the very oddity of the situation would slow responses.  Yes some people are going to do some looting, but with lots of loot to go around, it will take a little bit of time before violence ramps up.  Here, you have violent encounters within minutes of the event.

The novel starts off on a weak note with a lot of ranting, and conspiracy thinking directed at environmental groups. It shares with Directive 51 the dislike of the environmental groups –which are portrayed as being anti-people. This characterization is about as fare as saying that “survivalists” or “preppers” want the world to end. Its not that there is no ammunition there to work with, but it's a strange accusation to focus an entire novel around. This ranting is accompanied with an occasional global viewpoint narrator, which makes the preachiness more direct. The conspiracy theory that leads up to the global exchange of EMP (only) strikes is one of the odder ones out there.

Fortunately, the early omniscient style  is dropped for a more conventional shifting first person narrator approach fairly quickly.  The novel eventually settles on three groups of survivors.  In one the key oddities of the book, all three groups, even the one caught without its preps,  have an abundance of supplies, running water, and....electricity.  There is a doctored up explanation for why their solar panels work - but it is not very plausible.

There is a certain sameness to the characters- particularly the men. They are either independent outdoorsy sorts, or sociopath-type bad guys. None of them are married at the start of the novel, although they generally pickup women, and sometimes children along the way. All of them have bought the author's online materials and make frequent references to his website. The frequent authorial self-references get very tiresome.  In a free online web-book, the ham handed advertising would be acceptable.  In a commercial (self-published or otherwise) for-sale novel, it is not.

On the plus side, at least most of the way through the novels the heroes are fairly likable bunch. . You want them to do well.  Issues involving children, while possibly a little idealistic at times, are not ignored.  Dealing with post-combat stress and the various ways they manifest themselves, particularly after having killed someone, are brought into the story.  To the extent that there are enough weapons to go around the women and children fight. Varisous imponderables such as how to comfort a young boy who has killed someone with a .22LR rifle, or the ferocity and despair of parents protecting children are all focused on at some point.

Trapping as a survival skill is one of the major themes of the novel.  Trapping – a very useful skill – is combined with a tendency to have his characters living in Rawles-like fortresses. Three-quarter inch plate on the windows is the norm. For non-wealthy individuals, the set-up described would be nothing less than fantastically expensive. You have bunkers built into the sides of hills with 400 pound counterpoised steel doors. All this at the same time that the author makes fun of people with overpriced hunting firearms.

My thought would be that buying overpriced fortifications does not impart any more survival skills than buying overpriced weaponry. As we noted earlier when we were talking about U.S. Marine WW2 bunker busting techniques. The Japanese fortifications were far more heavily defended than anything today's civilians would be likely to have, but once the outlying flanking forces were driven  off, the bunkers were generally made short work of, often with such simple expedients as gasoline down the ventilation shafts.

Although the prepper-survivalist fortifications, and the mad dash to the distant countryside give the books a similar feel at times to Rawle's Patriot world, it does not have that worlds focus on Christians making their way through a fallen world.  Religion outside of the rantings of an odd little group of rapture seeking Christians and the earth loving Gaians, is barely noted.

Is it an enjoyable novel? Sometimes.

As noted earlier, the front end of the novel is a preachy.  As a more consistent first person narrative is picked up this preachiness is toned down through the middle portions of the novel.  Unfortunately as the book begins to reach its various conclusions, the Armies of Gaia show up, the preachiness returns.

In addition, as the wandering groups settle down, the novels writing style bogs down with a very slow pace of narrations combined with an enormous amount of repetition.  With better editing the book likely could have been about 1/3 shorter.

With the entrance of the  Gaian forces, the book becomes something of a militia novel.  Groups of foolish nature-loving city folks dare to traipse around in the wilderness and face off with our intrepid rural survivalists who have all bought their trapping accessories from "that Buckshot Guy's" website.  It is amazing that they don't use the snares to kill the wicked Wiccans.  Mostly they use a lot of homemade smoothbore cannons used as IEDs, and explosives procured from conveniently located old school survivalists, to drop mountains on people.  There is even a "barricade" scene reminiscent of Lucifer's Hammer, and One Second After.

As a piece of speculative fiction, the book makes some interesting points, but the author wears his political world view on his sleeve, and the activity at times is a more driven toward proving points than actual scenario building.  If there is a good idea (trapping, danger from wild dogs, wolves eat a lot), you will see it hammer on to the point where you will just wish that the dogs or wolves would finally eat someone important.

If you had asked me halfway through the book if I thought I was going to like it, I would have said "yes."  By the end of the book I was tired of it.   The Gaians are such obviously phony "straw man" villains, that you never even think for a moment that they are going to get anywhere against the well prepared heroes.

For our descriptive ratings:  Rating from 1 to 7 with 7 being high.

Realism?  It usually is dealing with the eyeball level of reality, and you do have some concerns about food and supplies.  As is fairly typical, the good guys have a disproportionate number of flesh wounds, but I will put that down to survival bias. The people in similar circumstances who are hit hard, don't get a book written about them.   The obvious authorial biases, making the work a bit of a polemic, tends to take away some of that reality.  I'll be generous and say that it is a six.

Readability?  The editing is uneven.  By self publishing standards it is better than average, but there are points where it is distracting.  The insane amount of repetition, particularly the embedded advertising makes a long novel drag even further.  That this is actually the first part of a trilogy is mind numbing.   Once the combat scenes start, they usually keep moving, but they are frequently broken up by mid-novel cliff hangers, as the author switchs points of view to some far off location.  With some  a lot of paring down there is the real makings of an exciting page turner.  As written, I will say that it is a two.

Preppers Road March: A Review

Peppers Road March is the first part of an apocalypse-in-progress in the area of  Atlanta, Georgia after an EMP-Solar Flare event. The series eventually came out as a collected compendium with all chapters under one cover.

Ron Foster is part founder of the Prepper Archaeology  website, and appears to have a number of entrepreneurial adventures going on at any one time..  I suppose not too surprisingly has the extremely varied education and career of a restless person.  Some of that training has been in the area of disaster management.   His novels are written very specifically toward a “prepper” audience.

It is a relatively cool (95º) summer day in Atlanta.  David has been interviewed and offered a position with FEMA's Atlanta office, and the wind down is taking place in a bar.    As happens with these books, the lights go out, and given that we are in Atlanta, possibly more importantly, the air conditioning stops.  The FEMA crowd is ex-military, so they are pretty much aware immediately what has happened.  It is either an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) or a large Solar Flare.  The protagonist has left his bug out bag at the motel, and did not bring his concealed carry piece to the interview.   So he is a little shy on his emergency kit.  He does have a money belt with $500 cash.,   and decides to head home.  The bar's enormous bouncer Dump (as in Dump Truck sized) is headed the same way, so  they start walking south to go home.

David is a fairly light hearted fellow.  He may not have his goodie (bugout) bag with him, but mentally he is well prepared.  Although it is not immediately obvious, he has no wife or children.  He has touching concern for his mother and an ex-girlfriend that are back home in Alabama.  Our hero makes friends easily, and dispenses much needed prepping advise to each little group he encounters along the way.  There are some signs of trouble, but rather realistically, it is of a rather sporadic nature.  Our hero avoids much of what trouble there is by staying off the highways and built up urban areas.

Although what I have is the front part of a longer novel, it does stop at a reasonable place.  David is not left hanging from a cliff with a bunch of hungry cannibals sharpening their steak knives down below.  The length of the story here was worth the price of admission.  Obviously if this story is something you think you would enjoy, it is more cost efficient to buy the now available compilation.


Its a fun little read.   It is unusually light hearted for a book that features the collapse - possibly permanent- of the modern world.  It is a travel story where you have an optimist for a companion.  In this case that unusual rarely seen creature - an optimist prepper.  If you don't mind the frequent breaks where Dave goes over some amazingly esoteric survival concepts with his latest new best friends, you will likely enjoy the book.

Now for our descriptive (versus qualitative) ratings: reality (sometimes referred to as grittiness), and readability.  The ratings run from 1 to 7: with 7 being high.   The Reality rating does not usually include an assessment of the collapse scenarios plausibility, unless it effects the ongoing story line.

The book is happening in the here and know.  It describes events from Dave's retrospective viewpoint.  Normally that would give it very high marks.   However, as I noted above,this a relatively cheerful book.  There is very little real tension.  Dave is much more competent than the people he meets.  For the most part he is able to plan for all eventualities, and Dave has grateful people supplying him with needed gear and alcohol along the entire route.  Dave is clearly the authors alter ego, and there is a little bit of wish fulfilment going on here. Dave is awfully spry for a fifty year old.  Although I am not taking any points off  Dave, an Alabamian, thinks 95 degrees in the Summer is hot.   I'll mark it at one point below maximum:  a 6.

Readability is a little harder.  I find the constant prepper advise asides mostly interesting and occasionally humorous.  Given the actual usefulness of such a short pep talk, one wonders if the life span off most of the clueless people he runs into is one-week past their last meal.  But any normal (sane?) reader is going to find them very distracting.  There are the usual self publishing typos.  They are so common now, that I barely notice them.  Not a page turner, with one point off for all the advise interruptions puts it at one-point above average:  a 5.

77 Days in September: A review.

Ray Gorham's 77 Days in September is an apocalypse-in-progress tale set mostly in the area of Houston, Texas, and rural central Montana after an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) wipes out electronic devices and the electrical grid in North America.  I say mostly Texas-Montana because there are occasional pull back references to other areas.

Ray Gorham was born in Canada, but is now a resident of the small community of Shepherd Montana, just a little northeast of Billings.   He operates a log home business and this is his first novel.  There is a nice interview of him here.  Although he makes clear he is interested in survival preparation, and notes Rawles' Survival Bog in the end of book acknowledgements, the story does not have Militia or U.N. conspiracy elements.

 

The start of the story is a somewhat common  EMP strike.  The author is a little more careful with his scenario, and does a better job of backing up the damage claims that result.  As I noted when I briefly discussed One Second After, I am not entirely convinced as to the extent of the damage to electronic devices, but the author certainly has a lot of fictional writers who share his ideas.  In any case, the scenario he generates to get an EMP over the United States is very well done.  The start of story shifts around to a few different view points, but after about one-third (30%) the story settles on two main ones, Kyle Tait trying to get home from Texas and his wife, Jennifer,  who live outside the small town of Missoula Montana waiting for him. 

The novel has a little in common with Odyssey in so far as you have a Penelope figure, waiting for a faithfully for a husband who is taking a long time getting home.  At the start of the story,  Kyle is in Houston Texas returning home after helping out with hurricane damage in that state.  To be more specific, his airplane is on the runway just beginning its takeoff  when the EMP strikes.  It crashes to a skidding halt.  As the survivors slide down the emergency chute at the back, nobody comes to get them.

Kyle is walking home.

The story does not have the instant bedlam that seems to afflict the British collapse stories, where people are apparently trained from their early years to recognize the signs of collapse and head to the nearest Pequot dealership to take advantage.

Along his journey our hero meets some people who show varying degrees of willingness to kill him, most of them out of evil intentions, and at least once out of general terror.  Kyle occasionally slows his progress up to help people, and sometimes the people wind up being a bit of a nuisance.  People being a nuisance is pretty realistic.  And there are also a number of people are willing to help him along his way.  One of these helpful people involves an improbable, and overlong interlude with a Calypso-type temptress who tries to dissuade him from continuing the journey.  This Calypso-element must be some sort of common fantasy of the middle aged men who write these tales, as it is also found in more extreme form in the EMP-like novel (which I have reviewed but not yet posted) Des Michaels' Terawatt. 

Jennifer, is meanwhile at home with the kids.  She begins to have issues with a young man who wishes her to pay attention to him, now that her husband is presumed dead after his severely delayed return.  The course that this part of the story takes involves an awful lot of hand wringing, and introspection.  The entire scenario strikes me as being a bit forced.  Just the normal dangers of trying to keep a handle on three kids, and scrounging up food might have been a better filler for this end of the story.  As is common with this type of novel, there are prepared type people who are able to conveniently step in and help the wife and kids along to self sufficiency.  If it weren't for the annoying young man, this portion of the novel would have quickly become a cozy.

I have read a number of novels of apocalypse-in-progress set in Texas now. I am starting to understand the landscape.  But it not with the help of the authors.  There is an odd presumption that people know what the Texas landscape is like. So at times the novel seems to have him floating walking around through some sort of novelistic "anyplace."  As our hero moves out of Texas, some of the descriptions get a little bit better, but it is still an unfortunate but common failing of these types of story.

The book is a bit preachy with some completely out of place discussions on morality.  There is a discussion on why youngsters, particularly woman, should not have casual sex?  All very nice, but none of woman in the story are either in the position, or old enough for this to be an issue except Jennifer, who is clearly not interested in the annoying young man.  More to the point would be what behavior would be appropriate, besides the commonly noted looting of unattended property, when trying to get survival food.  That seems a much more likely conundrum, and much more difficult to answer from a Christian viewpoint.  What if there was no convenient next door neighbors with a big garden, and your trying to feed three kids, and your husband is likely dead?  That is a question with some pretty severe costs attached to it.

While obviously (based on internet footprint) of a conservative mindset, the author does not use his novel as an extended political rant against all things liberal and/or of the Democratic Party. A throw away scene with a Democratic Congresswoman in Boston is the most noteworthy, and comes off as being rather vindictive.

My other major annoyance is that both Jennifer and Kyle, in their separate stories, get complete free passes on their unwillingness to take, brutal, but morally justified actions.  Neither character keeps the weapons that they have at hand.  Kyle almost makes a hobby of getting himself out of scrapes that a little bit more caution would have had him avoiding.  His encounter with he survivalist homestead (which he sees because they keep the outside light on at night?) is not terribly likely in any fashion. 

Did I like the story overall.  Yes.  As I noted it is not perfect, but it has a lot of interesting episodes, and a better mix of character types than most novels set within a collapse scenario.  Although they tend to blather on a bit too much, both Kyle and Jennifer are likable people and it is easy to be cheering for them.  As noted, the story has a bit of a cozy element to it.  But the cozy is the single easiest way to bring a collapse tale to a conclusion without killing everyone off. 

As to our two descriptive - versus qualitative, ratings - 1 to 7 with 7 being high.  Repeat, descriptive not qualitative.  I will do them in the reverse of their usual ordering.

Readability is a little mixed.  The early multiple points of view are done reasonably well, but do slow up the progression to the main story line.  The middle portions of the book, as noted above have an awful lot of talking, and moralizing, and there is an odd, redundant, introduction of a journal written by Kyle that simply seems to tell relatively slowly what narration could have done better.  That it is half-filled with lots of "I miss you guys" makes for some slow going.  On the plus side, the many action scenes are well done, and move along fairly quickly.  Even the neighborhood meetings are handled fairly quickly.  I am going to put it in the middle at 5.

Realism is much easier.  It is people dealing with real issues in  a somewhat real-time (versus retrospective fashion).  You live the moment and the difficulties with them.  I am tempted to knock of a point for Kyles frequent rescues, but it is well within accepted standards of the genre.  The author appears to have a clue as to the capabilities of a firearms, and knives.  I am going to say it is about as realistic as you are going to get within a fictional setting and say it is a 7.

Ray Gorham (from Goodreads)