Memory Boy: A Review

Will Weaver’s Memory Boy is a young adult (YA) post apocalyptic novel set in Minneapolis, MN after a series of eruptions in the Cascade Mountains has created an ashen nightmare.   The book was written in 2001 (before the events of the 911 terrorist attacks) and the events are occurring in a future 2008.  The author very recently came out with a companion novel The Survivors: which Kirkus gave a (teaser alert) reasonable review.

Will Weaver grew up in a small town in Minnesota on a dairy farm.  He taught at Bemidji State University for many years, and is now retired.  He writes both children's literature, and adult fiction.  His most recent work for adults was a memoir about hunting.  Much of his writing appears to revolve around rural and small town life.

To save my self some time I'll just give you the book blurb of what it is all about.

Ash is still falling from the sky two years after a series of globally devastating volcanic eruptions. Sunlight is as scarce as food, and cities are becoming increasingly violent as people loot and kill in order to maintain their existence. Sixteen-year-old Miles Newell knows that the only chance his family has of surviving is to escape from their Minneapolis suburban home to their cabin in the woods, As the Newells travel the highways on Miles' supreme invention, the Ali Princess, they have high hopes for safety and peace. But as they venture deeper into the wilderness, they begin to realize that it's not only city folk who have changed for the worse.

Alternate cover showing the Ali Princess in action.  Note the book has been around long enough to change
 how you market YA Collapse style novel. Note how much less grim this cover is than the one above.

Actually, the story has a split time line.  Some of it is occurring just after Mount Rainier and company blew their tops, and the other portion is that of what is described above.  The split story line continues for about 3/4ths of the novel, before the back story catches up with the front end of the novel.  The shifts in time are well accomplished, and is a good way to get a story into the action segment without sacrificing too much background/character development.

There is the usual failure to adequately describe the surroundings that the family is traveling through.  Again, authors writing stories within their home setting make presumptions about the basic understanding of the landscape.  How far can they see off the road when they are traveling?  How frequent are elevation changes.  A lot of the area of travel, at least today, is a lot more cluttered than you would think from the story.  At least when I Google Streetview, or Bing Birdseye view, it appears that way.

Because this is a YA novel, the nastiness is going to be implied more than experienced.  But it is not ignored.  The response they get from people is suitably quirky.  They come to realize that the natives in the area they are traveling into don't view them as being much better than wandering homeless people pushing a shopping cart, so it is important to give a sense of destination, of belonging to a place.  They also learn to be careful of these locals.  Not all of them are dangerous, but everywhere they go, certain small groups have learned to take advantage of the weak.  It is not open warfare, but it is dangerous.

Along the way, there are a number of astute observations as to the mechanics of the collapse.  They come to realize that the large isolated suburban home that they had recently moved to was one of the least safe.  People assumed that the wealthy had resources and were hording the best food and supplies for themselves.  Too far apart to be self-supporting, and not really knowing their neighbors that well in any case (their is zero community organizing) these areas become the first target for the criminal and the desperate.

I did enjoy the story.  It is not particularly long, and it does have some of that teenage banter that reminds you of a sitcom at times.  But it is well thought out, and well written.

For our descriptive (versus qualitative) categorizations.  Rated 1 to 7 with 7 being high.

 

Realism:  More dangerously realistic than you might expect for the target audience.  I don't want to give away too much information, but a lot of their starting off assumptions wound up being seriously flawed, and very little of their planning survived unaltered.  It is not a militia brawl, but there is physical danger.  They make some mistakes, and pay for them.  But by virtue of being a relatively "safe" YA novel, some of the heat is lost. Call it a 6.

Readability is easy.  The use of language is easy and straightforward without being dull.  The story hangs on a bare bones structure that allows it to be a page-turner at times.  Again a 6.

Will Weaver (from his website)

Etiquette for an Apocalypse: A Review

Anne Mendel's Etiquette for an Apocalypse is a post apocalyptic tale set in Portland Oregon where a small remnant of people are just starting to pick up the pieces from a two-stroke environmental crises, water shortages followed by the Yellowstone Caldera blowup blotting out the skies, has pancaked civilization.   Just as it is starting to look a little stable, a serial killer shows up.

 

Anne Mendel grew up in Arkansas and now lives in Portland.  She did actually go to a charm school, although the authoress does not state if she successfully completed the course of work, just that she "attended."  On the blog portion of her website, she does list weekly tips to the neophyte, so some of her apocalyptic concerns are genuine.

 

The novel starts of with a Sara Silverman quote.  Quoting Sarah Silver makes me a bit nervous.  While I would be the first to say that Ms. Silverman is a very pretty young lady, that would be about all I could say in the way of kindness.  So I will let someone else summarize:

Sarah Silverman, crude comedian with a certain feminist flair

Yes, Silverman is quite a polarizing figure...a woman whose "comedy may seem offensive to Jews, African-Americans, Latinos, gay people, you name it, but that's because she's in persona as someone who is clueless, uninformed but certain in her beliefs."

But I am guessing that the Silverman quote is there to signal that this is a hip book with a secular-Jewish world view, and more than a bit of tongue in cheek to it. 

It starts with our mother-heroine, Sophie Cohen,  mad a the world.  She is in post-apocalyptic Portland, Oregon after a variety of water wars, Yellowstone park caldera blasts, earthquakes, etcetera knock the world to peaces.  The apocalypse is severe, and as far as the people in Portland know, there is not a whole lot left standing anywhere else in the country, or possibly the world.

The story is just barely post-apocalyptic.  It is the year 2023, and the first stage of the collapse (previously mentioned water wars) was six years ago, and the Yellowstone eruption is three years past.  The die off is still going on.  People pile up the bodies outside the hospital where her husband works as a Doctor.  But the accumulating piles are getting smaller, and there is less rampaging and mayhem.

Although it is revealed slowly, Sophie has gathered together some surviving remnants of her parents coop apartment building had are busy in their own tiny village way, trying to go about getting enough to feed everyone.  There is a bit of entrepreneurial spirit going on with various residents coming up with ways to earn food, and trade items in the little market place that Sarah has set up in the coops parking lot.  One of the big sellers is the painkillers and antibiotics that her mad genius brother cooks up in his laboratory.

Sarah's husband is a doctor and works at the local hospital in exchange for an allotment of bread.  He discovers the bodies of young women with their hearts cut out in the body dump, and is concerned that there is a serial killer on the loose.  Since there is no police to speak of,  and being a naturally kind hearted doctor type, he drags Sarah into an amateur investigation of the goings on.

The tale spins out of control, in an interesting sort of way, from there.  There are rendezvous with what gives me vague memories of Deviants Palace (from the eponymous novel).  A war breaks out, and there is fair amount of action.  It is fairly obvious that the author does not have a lot of background in military affairs - she possibly has played some first person shooter combat games with her children.   She uses that with a smidgen of common sense to guide the action.  Since this is a bit of a send up, not all the action is exactly plausible, although it can be fairly humorous at times.  In the end, I became glad for the Silverman quote signaling because her post apocalyptic send up is not actually much less realistic than a lot of novels that are trying to be dead serious.

For something that has a little bit of a parody to it, a lot of the good guys die, and there is frequent memories of her teenage son who had died in a cholera epidemic.  It has a very odd sense of simultaneous sadness with humor.

In Sophia's coop, they don't have much in the way of weapons.  They really on some local toughs, because....they have no choice.  They are not survivalist/preppers.  What guns they have, they have no ammunition for.  Later, before going into a tight situation, someone hands her a gun:

 

What am I going to say? I don't believe in guns?  I didn't used to believe in eating red meat, and now I would gladly eat a sixteen ounce steak tartare (p190).

Did I enjoy the book.  Yes, I did.  At times my neck got a little stiff from the tennis-match back and forth between serious situations, and humorous silliness.   Sophie is starving through much of the book, so she is constantly relating situations to food.  I am a supposed to laugh at her starvation?  As I said it is a bit of a conflict, and it actually gets to be more problematic as the action heats up.  But in the end, Sophia and her family are likable people, and you do want to root for them.  Some portions of the book, mostly early on, even qualify as a page turners.  There is some adult content, but while being relatively frank in its discussion of urban-adult themes, I didn't find it particularly offensive.  There is more use of foul language than is probably necessary.  In net, it has a very strong start, and a muddled but entertaining conclusion.

For our descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: realism and readability.  Ratings go 1 to 7 with seven being the high end of the scale.

Realism?  Well there is a bit of a parody to the entire affair.  The real problem is that the parody is actually not less realistic than many of the serious novels in the genre.  It actually does discuss a lot of issues that would be relevant to a societal collapse.  Particularly early on, it is one of the better urban collapse scenarios available.  At the risk of insulting the author's intent at parody, I will say that it is at the mid-point and call it a 4.

Readability is easy, as in it is an easy read.  It is pretty much a straight tale interlaced with the "ironic" tone so common to much of today's entertainment, that nobody will be confused by it.  As I noted, it is even a page turner at points.  I will say that it is a 6.

White Horse: A Review

Alex Adam's White Horse is a plague-driven apocalypse-in-progress novel with action at various times in Portland Oregon, Italy and Greece.  It is a bit of a reverse Odyssey.  Instead of Penelope waiting for Odysseus to come home to her, our Penelope (named Zoe) goes looking for him.  It is a standalone novel, but is stated as being the  the first part in a trilogy.

Alex Adams, from her sites biography, was born in New Zealand, raised in Greece and Australia, and currently lives in Oregon.  She apparently is a fan of PA-computer games including Fallout 3, and along with a general fascination with the idea of a coming apocalypse has read at least some of the classics of the genre.  The book itself has a promotional page with sample sections.

The story is split as a "before and after" story.  One thread occurs in Portland, Oregon, and is told in the immediate lead up to the disaster, with the second alternating sections being the "disaster now" running commentary.  The apocalyptic sections start in Italy, with our heroine trying to make her way to a safer location, while keeping her moral compass somewhat intact.

At a nice interview at the Post Apocalyptic Book Club she notes that she took care in trying to get the details down.

The biggest challenge was really figuring out the logistics. Things had to make sense. I couldn’t have 90% of the world’s population dropping dead within a week, and I couldn’t have Zoe walking across Italy in two days. So I did a lot of number crunching and spent a long time poring over Google Maps. Also, I did a lot of shaking my fist at the ceiling and swearing, because sometimes what I wanted to do wouldn’t work in any universe with real laws of nature.

The "logistics" are fairly seamlessly weaved into the telling of the story.  Its not one of the type of story that is going to go into the carbohydrate needs broken down by food type.

The collapse itself is interesting.  The pandemic is a viral cancer that causes severe mutations.  Mostly it kills people: 90% of them.   Of the other 10%, half-of them survive with (usually) disabling mutations that give a zombie-like cast to some of the proceedings.  The other half are simply immune.  Zoe is immune.  But she is having a baby, and in the chaos of the collapse, birth control with her new love was a bit sporadic.  It is not clear until the end why her lover is not with her (and I won't tell here),  but she is trying very hard to get to him.

Along the way, she meets some very unsavory people, and some normal helpful people.  Some times the unsavory people wind up being helpful in spite of themselves, and the normal people she tries to help turn out to be a liability: sort of like life.

Did I like it. There was a point about 2/3rds of the way through where I did start getting a little tired of the continuing journey.  Some of the happenings were a bit surreal and over the top, which lost a little of the mid-story tension.  But it ended on a strong note, and is one of those relatively rare novels that ends strong without turning itself into a cosy.  Our heroine while hardly being a bible-thumping moralist, tries very hard to help people and do the right thing. So by the time I arrived at the end of the tale, I was happy.

For our descriptive (versus qualitative) ratings:

Realism:  the nature of the plague has a science fiction speculative aspect to it. There are other collapse issues, but it is the eponymous White Horse plague that dominates.  It makes for an at times harrowing story, but not exactly one that I find myself much worrying about.  If we manage to get ourselves killed off by a plague, it is unlikely to be anything nearly so interesting.  There is some concern for food and shelter, but with 90% of the people gone, scavenging for materials is not all that difficult as we are less than a year (as I read it) into the full collapse.  I am gone to say that the fantastical balances out reasonably well with what is real, and say that it is at the mid-point of 4.

Readability:  the authoress uses a clipped page turning style of writing on what is actually at times a rather ruminating, pondering novel.  It is an unusual mix, but it keeps the navel gazing somewhat in check.   What symbology is there seems rather obvious.  The jumpy writing, and occasional half-explained event, can be confusing at times.  So as a quirky non-page turner written in a page turning style, I will put it above the median at 5.

Alex Adams (obviously not a guy)

More importantly (?), she seems to have a fondness for cats.  And possibly black cats in particular.

The back cover: A certain member of my household believes that this would have made a better front cover than the white (wrong color!) horse (a bulky oversized creature!) picture that was used.

Lost Everything: A Review

Brian Francis Slattery's Lost Everything is a post-apocalyptic novel set  in a climate stressed, overheating, collapsed America of what appears to be the late 21st century: taking place primarily along the towns and cities of the wide, but previously shallow, Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and Upstate New York.  It has been a very long collapses with global warming driven super storms piling into an economy ruined by resource depletion.  And of course, because we are what we are, we still  have enough rudimentary military equipment left to fight over the ashes.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor at the New Haven Review, writes a variety of short pieces on a variety of subjects including one (here as pdf) on the imagining future wars, and has published two previous novels.  His Spaceman Blues received a number of Best Novel (2008) nominations, and was the story of the last days of earth before being overcome by an alien attack.  His other novel, Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America was also a post-apocalyptic novel- although it appears to have been of a slightly more satirical bent than our novel here.  If Liberation had elements of satire, this novel has elements of the blues.

The novel has a bluesy, surrealistic moodiness.  It mixes a bit of the feel of Twain's Huck Finn, with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (video).   A father is heading to the tiny town of Whitney Point, NY to retrieve the son that he stashed away there for safe keeping.  The war, a confusing mess of low level violence is slowly marching its way north from Baltimore, and the penultimate meteorological storm is pushing down from the north.  Everyone is stuck between the two destructive forces.

The Susquehanna has always been a very wide, long river, and did interlock with the greater Upstate New York canal system of the Eire Canal era.  But it was not easily navigable by large boats, and Pennsylvania's incompetence building canals, meant that along its lower reaches, the towns grew up with the railroads, using the water for a variety of industrial purposes rather than as a means of transport.  But global warming has brought heat and monsoons, and the Susquehanna of our novel is now open to river boat traffic - even if it is disheveled, thrown together post-apocalyptic river boat traffic.

The area is a great setting for the slow economic strangle version of an apocalypse in progress. The satirical movie Slapshot from the 1970s captured its “splendor” and it has been a bumpy slide since than.. If you have read any of James Kunstler's rants about the slow collapse of the old New York economy, you are familiar with the area.  Although Kunstler is  near Albany, he is right next door in terms of socio-economics.   Once an absolute power house of small industrial towns and villages, these areas have  been sending their children elsewhere to work for some time.

Although Slattery's geographic descriptions are a bit jumbled, what he does give you is very well done:

At the start of his journey, our hero is in a van headed toward the river (p.45):

They curved onto a long ramp over the water, where the islands fell away, the valley opened out, and the river swelled wide. It was cutting the hill in half, tearing the wound wide.  The ridge was ragged with the river's assault , fell to the shore at steep angles.  Covered in foliage, leaning trees. Rocks shaking loose from the bleeding wall.  The highway, the giant Clarks Ferry Bridge, a toy amid all this violence.  Once it had shot across the gap over the water, the river unperturbed around its monumental pilings. It would have pulled it all down in time. But the war got to it first, took down the bridge's middle third.  The western end then fell all on its own, leaving the eastern end a jagged pier, its length ending in crumbling concrete, bubbled asphalt.  Metal beams jutting below. The rubble from the explosion was gone. The river had made its bed with it, and the birds had returned already to the bridge's underside, built nests in the blackened steel . Their cries bouncing off the water's sleek surface.  All the while, the river dug deeper.  Bringing the mountain to its knees.

Life is pretty minimal.  A grown woman can remember back to her boyfriend's car, and going out on a date of sorts, using his next to last tank of gas.

Whitney Point, NY is not doing real well in the novel

If there is an elite jet-set left somewhere, they are not found along the Susquehanna.  In what is presumably some sort of attempt at PC-thinking, the author has women in most of the stronger authoritative roles.  Within the dystopian setting, this has the (presumably) unintended effect of making women seem particularly culpable and blameworthy for the sad state of the world: their the ones in charge after all. There is certainly not a whole lot of the civilizing effects of woman visible, which may go some ways toward explaining why everyone is behaving so poorly.

The story combines an odd variety of narrative tracks. There is an overall narrator, who has investigated the occurrences within the novel, but was not present during the actual activities. Which combines oddly with the standard third person narrative, and and a variety of individuals retrospective  histories. It tends to make for a bit of a wobbly unfocused mess.

Much like Mr. Kunstler’s happier collapse in north of Albany in upstate New York, this novel features a number of musical interludes. The musical interludes were rather dull in Mr. Kunstler’s work, and if they are less dull hear, it is only because you don’t have to suffer through as much of it. The intersection of musical performance and fiction is tricky. The only novel I have personally read that pulled it off is Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses (available from author here as pdf ) and it is noteworthy in its uniqueness.

There is some interesting looks into what it would be like to grow up in a collapsing society, and the variety of usually negative experiences that would come from this setting. These are not a representations of the well adjusted, productive folks. Primarily, because within the setting it does not appear to be possible to be well adjusted and productive.

It nets out as a hazy tale of redemption that would almost seems to be taking place along some slow moving river in the 19th century Southern United States.

Given the somewhat scattershot ending, I am guessing that the author might be aiming toward a message similar to that of Marcus Aurelius (from Meditations):

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”

Unfortunately, given the confusing narrative structure, and over-the-top magical realism, I think the story is coming closer to another of Mr. Aurelius’s quotes –also from Meditations:

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

Like the author, I also lived in the area of the story for a time.  So I had a natural interest in seeing how it was portrayed.  I also don't necessarily mind that odd blend of reality and fiction referred to as magical realism.   One suspects that simply by being confusing, it will gain itself some positive reviews.  One wouldn't want to admit that one didn't get the point of the whole story; to admit that you were confused.  But to my mind it is not so much confusing, as unfocused, with poorly sequenced vignettes trying to tell too much story rather than telling one story well.  So while I wouldn't say that I actively disliked the story, I also wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it.  Of course if you like the idea of magical realism meets the apocalypse, and you go into the tale knowing that the hard driving plot line is going to end up swamped in a dikeside puddle, you will enjoy some of the language along the way.

Well we will wrap up here quickly:  Realism and readability: 1 to 7 with 7 being high.  These are intended merely to describe, not as a qualitative assessment.

Realism:  There are ghosts.  They are real.  It is magical realism of the fuzziest sort.  In addition the author's story telling style seems to more in sync with being on a Mississippi River boat, than  post-modern collapsed environs.  Both "The War" and "The Storm" are mindless phenomena beyond the control of humans.  It is a one.

Readability:  It is literary.  You travel with the characters through most of the novel, without them revealing to you what they obviously have known all along.  There are fairly obvious symbolic encounters, events, portents, etcetera whose meanings are obscure at best.  It all adds to the atmosphere of the surreal, but it makes it a tougher read.  On the plus side the descriptive language is good, and the novel does move along reasonably well for such an introspective creature.  I will say that it is a literary 2.

Brian Francis Slattery