I feel like I should make a couple of disclaimers here before I post what may be a disappointing review. I don't want to give a lot away, and without providing spoilers, it's hard to do that.
Overall, I think this is an excellent book. It is much shorter, and much less epic, than Light's Out. Where Light's Out and other prepper fiction largely focuses on drawing a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic world, discussing the author's particular philosophy of prepping, and impressing us with tacticool, this book mostly focuses two men, who they are, and what they are about. One is a long-time prepper who was ready for the collapse, saw it coming, and is trying to get to his bugout location. The other is just a worthless drunk awakening to a world where he can no longer grant himself the luxury of wallowing in the bottom of a bottle.
Where this book is different than most of the other books I have read is that it focuses on what each man must do, and what he chooses to do, when faced with various difficult choices. In popular prepper fiction, the good guys are all hard-core Christians with a strong prepper background, they always make the right choices, and the drunks, rubes, and regular folks are all doomed to fall victim to inevitably Latin American gangbangers. I think that Crawford made the conscious choice with this book and took it down a different path. The choices you make along the way matter more than how many guns you have; the people you help, and that ally yourself with, will matter, and that a happy ending isn't guaranteed, for anyone, just as the good guy may turn out to be not so good after all.
This book won't teach or preach about prepping, but it's a good read, pretty engaging, and the fact that I am still feeling very strongly about the ending tells me that the character development was pretty good.
Overall, I think this is an excellent book. It is much shorter, and much less epic, than Light's Out. Where Light's Out and other prepper fiction largely focuses on drawing a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic world, discussing the author's particular philosophy of prepping, and impressing us with tacticool, this book mostly focuses two men, who they are, and what they are about. One is a long-time prepper who was ready for the collapse, saw it coming, and is trying to get to his bugout location. The other is just a worthless drunk awakening to a world where he can no longer grant himself the luxury of wallowing in the bottom of a bottle.
Where this book is different than most of the other books I have read is that it focuses on what each man must do, and what he chooses to do, when faced with various difficult choices. In popular prepper fiction, the good guys are all hard-core Christians with a strong prepper background, they always make the right choices, and the drunks, rubes, and regular folks are all doomed to fall victim to inevitably Latin American gangbangers. I think that Crawford made the conscious choice with this book and took it down a different path. The choices you make along the way matter more than how many guns you have; the people you help, and that ally yourself with, will matter, and that a happy ending isn't guaranteed, for anyone, just as the good guy may turn out to be not so good after all.
This book won't teach or preach about prepping, but it's a good read, pretty engaging, and the fact that I am still feeling very strongly about the ending tells me that the character development was pretty good.
