A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. It is an obsessive, nightmarish book, the more so because it is written on almost a deadpan level of narration, deliberately shorn of histrionics.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. The people of the story are very real their tragic awareness becomes the possession of the reader. He prefers to meet his end, fishing familiar waters of his youth. The dead- caught in their daily round of living no sign of life. He is not allowed back, because of contamination but his report is part of the record. One sailor jumps ship- and goes back to his home. This submarine is sent on an expedition to determine through periscope and radar, what is behind the continued sending from a Puget Sound post. In the harbor is the one known surviving submarine of the U S A Navy. To some it brings cessation from all activities to others, indulgence in excesses of one kind or another to still others, refusal to face the inevitability of the end, and a grim determination to go on as if next Spring would find the blooming of bulbs planted in the Fall - and they there to see it. In Australia, where only the upper fringes so far lie within the circle, the people of the community of which he writes have exact scientific knowledge of when their doom will descend. But then the real catastrophe comes, as the death dealing effects encompass the living world. There has been a brief atomic war, launched by two nations and resulting in mutual destruction within a brief month.
And now comes Shute again with a portrait of the last stand of mankind against an enemy over which there was no control- radiation, gradually encompassing and destroying the world.
In 1954 Philip Wylie wrote a grisly story of what the future might hold for an unprepared citizenry in Tomorrow.
In 1939 Nevil Shute wrote a horrifyingly prophetic book,, which made the life of the average citizen under bombardment only too real, as time proved.
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