Book #15 of 2020: A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen True to its title, this post-apocalyptic novel opens after the point when many stories of its genre have finished: with humanity decimated by plague, but its societies generally through the transitional chaos and now beginning to rebuild. It’s also a time of fresh …
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Book #161 of 2019: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller I didn’t have much patience for this generic post-apocalypse story about a widower living in rural isolation with his dog and his somehow-more-misanthropic neighbor. (That guy shoots anyone who tresspasses into their compound. Our narrator does too; he just feels bad about it.) The tone …
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Book #157 of 2019: Wanderers by Chuck Wendig I expected this novel about a pandemic of sleepwalking to resemble Stephen King’s apocalyptic classic The Stand (or ideally Emily St. John Mandel’s elegiac Station Eleven), but it plays out more like a Michael Crichton medical thriller instead. And honestly, that’s just a difficult framework to sustain …
Book #49 of 2019: The Book of M by Peng Shepherd This post-apocalyptic novel takes a little while to click into place for me, in part because its inciting plot doesn’t exactly endear me to the characters and in part because the rules of its world feel hazy in a magical realist way that I …
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Book #43 of 2019: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel I love this book just as much as I remember, and upon this reading I’m particularly struck by the quiet tone of the work. It’s all too easy for a writer of this sort of world-ending saga to lean on the action and the …
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Book #23 of 2018: The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King I like this Dark Tower prequel novella, but it’s admittedly pretty extraneous to the regular series. The Mid-World setting makes it seem more primary, but it’s really closer in nature to a tangential Stephen King book like Black House than anything particularly essential …
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Book #260 of 2017: The Waste Lands by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #3) This third book in my reread of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is just as great as I had remembered. If Book 1 mostly serves to introduce the weird world of this story, and Book 2 serves to recruit the supporting …
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Book #163 of 2017: The Gunslinger by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #1) It’s probably been a good decade or more since I last read this book, and I was surprised to find it better than I had remembered. I still stand by my usual advice for the Dark Tower series, which is that you …
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Book #57 of 2015: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel Following in the tradition of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and Stephen King’s The Stand, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven spins a tale of our modern society collapsing and rebuilding itself in the wake of a calamitous plague that kills off much of …
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