"One Second After": A Book Report

One Second After, by William R. Forstchen


Summary:
A not-particularly-well written novel about the effects of an EMP on a small town in North Carolina and the surrounding countryside. Characters are flat and boring, and are generally used as delivery pieces for information:  the police chief talks about martial law, the doctor talks about health and disease, and the protagonist -- a history professor -- is a thinly veiled author expy.

We are continually beaten about the head regarding how awful an EMP attack is, and how woefully unprepared the USA is for one, despite all the other post-9/11 terrorist drills, and yet there are no mentions of Farraday Cages at all.

One of the author's -- excuse me, I meant protagonist's -- children is a 12 year old daughter with Type 1 diabetes. It ends as badly as you think it might for her, despite the fact that the novel is set in a rural community, with repeated mentions of both veterinarians, cattle,and pig farms.  I find it implausible that the town of Black Mountain was able to string up old 1920s style telephones, but no one thought to research getting insulin from livestock like the way it was done, oh, up until the 1980s.

The author's other daughter is a 17 year old, who stupidly gets pregnant during the famine-and-dieoff portion of the novel, because that makes sense. Then her boyfriend dies in the defense of the town against Mad Max style raiders, and because the author was also a colonel in the military who assigned the boy to that station, he pledges to raise his bastard grandchild out of a sense of guilt. Because a risky pregnancy during a famine is fine, but taking an interest in who your child is fucking beforehand is out of the question.

I threw the novel across the room when the author's mother-in-law suggests that he kill his dead daughter's dog so that his stupid pregnant daughter can have protein so that the baby can be brought to term.

It's slightly cheerier than The Road, but not by much, and that book was also stupid and depressing.

Do not read, unless you like dark endings, idiot characters, or being lectured.