By Chuck Wendig

Del Rey (US) out now; Rebellion (UK) out July 10

Sleepwalking into oblivion…

Those who’ve read SFB over the past few years will know that we’ve followed, and enjoyed, Chuck Wendig’s storytelling; I also had the pleasure of working editorially on some of his early Miriam Black and Mookie tales. There’s a passion to his writing that is impossible to miss, and he brought that energy to the Star Wars universe in his trilogy of post-Return of the Jedi novels, telling a story on a very wide canvas across the whole of that galaxy far far away. (As well as, horror of horrors, actually reflecting all the different shades of humanity – something that has been a hallmark of his writing from the start.)

He’s brought both the passion and the scope to this epic tale, which, for me, is up there with Robert McCammon’s Swan Song as one of the best apocalyptic novels of the past few decades. Where Wendig differs from McCammon (and Stephen King, whose book The Stand is the obvious other comparison for this) is that the opposing sides around the central event are not some great supernatural beings, but men and women whose lives are portrayed in shades of grey. Everything is drawn from human nature – the weak become easy prey for those whose agendas are darker – and come as a result of actions that we’ve taken ourselves.

I don’t want to get into the plot – as much as anything else, Wendig is a past master at WTF moments that lose their effect if a review tells you “watch out for the gamechanger x-way through the book” – but long term Wendig readers (Wendigos?) will immediately spot that this is written in past rather than present tense. Combined with the extracts at the top of each chapter (and don’t skim past them – there’s a lot of important detail there), they give the sense of a historical record drawn together from testimonies from multiple sources. It’s also a snapshot of the world in 2019 – the story is set in the US, but so much of it would play out similarly elsewhere around the globe – in all its sometimes tattered glory. We recognise the characters, some whom we might wish we would emulate in such circumstances; others that, perhaps to our shame, we know would be more likely to reflect us.

Verdict: Strong plotting, credible characters and multiple strands deftly handled: a prime example of post-apocalyptic fiction that centres on the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. A must-read. 10/10

Paul Simpson