Reviews 68 

Purgatory's Shore 

by

Taylor Anderson 

Reviews by Jacqueline Lichtenberg haven't been indexed yet. 

Taylor Anderson's famous Destroyermen series

 builds an alternate Earth with open dimensional gateways, usually embedded in a storm at sea.  Ships from our Earth at various periods of our Earth's history seem to fall through these gates and land on this alternate Earth with no way back.

The groups that survive the gate rebuild some semblance of what they knew on our Earth, but adjust to the vicious environment on this new Earth where giant (voracious) animals command the seas and murderous non-human people swarm the land.

Anderson pits the values of our Earth's civilizations against the Nature of this untamed Earth, and reveals many flaws and strengths within our Earth's peoples.

Having created and won an entirely different World War II than they came from, the Destroyermen sail into a relative peace with rosy prospects.  

So Anderson takes us back in time to when a few ships from the newly founded USA bound for our Yucatan fall into this new Earth's much altered Gulf Coast area, somewhat off their version of Yucatan.

This novel, Purgatory's Shore, https://amazon.com/Purgatorys-Shore-Artillerymen-Book-1-ebook/dp/B08R55VC7S/ begins a new series of the adventures of strangers cascading through the vortex into this new Earth. It is called Artillerymen, as the armed force being sent to our Yucatan sported state of the art artillery units who really knew what they were doing with a canon.

Purgatory's Shore is a war novel -- and little much else. It does show us how the rag-tag survivors of the American force manage to pull together an alliance of various city-states (some not human populated) to combat a religion driven, empire building, movement which, in Destroyermen, proves to be a formidable enemy.

The book was written during the Covid-19 restrictions, and turned out somewhat different from the Destroyermen. Purgatory's Shore has much less character driven relationship and much more combat maneuvering, battle after battle.

When not in combat, the forces are repairing, regrouping and training.  

I expect the Artillerymen series to open up into much more relationship, even love story, but not Romance, as one of the main characters is a young woman who has been a member of the fighting force disguised as a boy.  It is something of a cliche, true, but Anderson has a knack with cliche that I admire.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com