Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List}: Malorie (sequel to Bird Box) by Josh Malerman

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Malorie (sequel to Bird Box) by Josh Malerman

by Karen S. Wiesner

Bird Box, a post-apocalyptic horror novel by Josh Malerman, was published in 2014. See my review of it here: https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2023/09/karen-s-wiesner-put-this-one-on-your.html. The direct sequel, Malorie, was published in 2020 (two years after the Netflix film adaptation starring Sandra Bullock aired). The initial chapters are set two years after the events of the first story, in which Malorie and her two young children are forced out of the school for the blind they've been staying, safe in a group setting, from undefined creatures that have caused mankind to go homicidally mad just by looking at them. From the school, they flee to an abandoned Jewish summer camp. The story in Malorie really begins 12 years after that point.

The kids are now teenagers going through many changes--for Tom (or Boy, as he was referred to in the first book), it's wanting to rebel against any and all authority. In this case, that's his mother, who forces them to live in fear, always protected against the monsters that have destroyed the world as she knew it. Tom believes he's found the means to combat the madness that comes from seeing the creatures. Malorie refuses to allow him to test his prototype out, since doing so would not only be dangerous for all of them, but deadly for the person who made the attempt. For Olympia (or Girl, as she was called in Bird Box), she fears telling the secret she's been hiding for so long, knowing how badly her mother would react to learning the truth about her.

When Malorie learns that her parents might still be alive, she's too wary to leave their secure hiding place…until, of course, their safety is breached and she has no choice but to flee. Going to the place her parents were last seen seems like the best option, but I'm certain, if not for that immediate threat, she never would have considered leaving.

Malorie is 12 years into raising her children, holding on to them so hard, they're bleeding (not simply chaffing) from her inflexible tyranny in enforcing the rules. In preparation for writing this review, I reread Bird Box and found Malorie even more abusive in that story than I originally remembered when writing the review for the first book. She lives in fear and thrusts the kids into the same terror that constantly threatens to drown her. She justifies this by telling herself that, to survive, she has to be unceasingly disciplined and ruthless. As I said in that review, being cold with children, withholding affection, in no way makes anyone physically safer, let alone happier and well-adjusted. In fact, I think the opposite is actually true. If there's a strong bond of love with open communication and a willingness to listen to other people's feelings and ideas, there's more acceptance and obedience as everyone tries to work together to ensure safety and well-being are achieved. In this case, I don't know that that ends justify the means. In this sequel, Malorie was unnecessarily cruel, harsh, and loveless in her discipline. She never explained anything to her children. She was more like a ruthless drill sergeant. Her unyielding authority led to all the problems that followed in the book. Tom and Olympia are perfect examples of what happens with this kind of parenting. Kids either rebel violently or they become exact matches of their own barbaric authority figure, which is a vicious circle. I believe Malorie's only saving grace was that she didn't ask her kids to do anything she wasn't willing to do herself--and religiously!

Although it was very hard to accept Malorie's justifications as acceptable, I wasn't without compassion. I can't imagine the hell of her situation. How do parents keep children safe in a world where there's literally no such thing? Even in the present day, this is a universal struggle, and no one has found definitive answers since, naturally, no one seems to agree on what's actually right and what's actually wrong. I found it sad (if a little clichéd and pathetic) that Tom became such a reckless, foolish person, damning all when he finally threw off the shackles of his confinement. If Malorie had just listened to his ideas and tried to find ways to encourage him without putting them in danger, he wouldn't have reacted the way he did. If Olympia had felt safe enough to talk to her mother about who and what she is, she wouldn't have had to withhold secrets her mother desperately needed to know. When militant obedience is the only required response…well, what could possibly make life worth living? Mere survival won't be enough for long.

Without these conflicts, the book wouldn't have had much of a foundation, and, given that these very questions are the ones that mirror society as we know it in the present day, they're valid and relatable. Despite the timeworn nature of the plot problems, there's a fresh spin on them here and I enjoyed this book as much as I did the last one. The scenario was compelling and tense, constantly escalating.

However, this follow-up was supposed to provide "the reason for all the bloodshed", and it didn't. Not at all. Instead, the creatures in Malorie are even more mysterious, illusive, numerous, and actually appeared to have evolved since the last story, though again they're never described to us and we don't learn a single thing about who and what they are, where they came from, and what their purpose is (beyond making sure every person on the planet is killed--one can't help wondering what the point of that is from the monsters' point-of-view). That lack of resolution (again) was more than a little unsatisfying. I feel like I've only gotten half of a story because this went without saying (again).

Mild disappointment aside, if you liked Bird Box (the book and the movie), you should equally like Malorie. This tale also serves as a cautionary tale: Instead of treating your children like soldiers under your command, view them as unique individuals, worthy of love and respect. Encourage them to contribute not just to survival but also to the enrichment of life.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Bird Box by Josh Malerman

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Bird Box by Josh Malerman

by Karen S. Wiesner

Bird Box is a post-apocalyptic horror thriller published in 2014. Most people know of the story because of the 2018 Netflix movie starring Sandra Bullock, something that is actually a very worthy adaptation of the novel. However, being a proponent of "the book is usually better than the movie", I had to read it before I watched it. Discovering that this was the debut novel of a singer/songwriter in the Detroit band The High Strung was a bit of a surprise to me. Josh Malerman wrote 14 novels between shows on the road with his band. A high school friend of his in the book business encouraged him to submit something, and the rest is history.

The main character in Bird Box is Malorie. The present story--4 years into the situation referred to as "The Problem"--is woven with flashbacks from two other time periods. The first is when Malorie discovers she's pregnant from a one-night stand. This happens alongside international news reports of people seeing some undefined creature outside that causes them to go mad, then kill others before killing themselves. The second time period is after Malorie is forced to leave the home she'd been living in with her sister in order to seek shelter with other survivors. One of the other women in the safe house is also about four months pregnant (a bit unbelievable, if I'm honest, especially when the two women go into labor almost exactly at the same time). While sequestered with all the windows covered, they discover they can use birds in a box as an alarm system in case anything comes near the house.

In the present, Malorie is alone, raising another woman's child and her own and not distinguishing one from the other in any way. In fact, the reader doesn't know for most of the story which one is her kid. In order to keep them save, she's used harsh training techniques (one being the use of a blindfold) that have heightened the senses of the four-year-olds. She refers to the children as only "Boy" and "Girl". When they have no choice but to seek out a refuge Malorie has heard of that has medical supplies, food, and safety, they venture out into the world again--blindfolded the entire time they travel, even while in a boat.

This is a very intense, suspenseful novel centered around an unlikely scenario that wouldn't have worked at all if it wasn't written as a character driven story. The plot would have fallen apart in a second if not for that, in large part because, as one reviewer said, "The reason for all the bloodshed is never explored or explained."

The main character's choices do prove to be problematic for me, as do some of the scenarios that stretched belief a little too far. First, the "harsh training techniques" give me pause. Malorie is only once shown to be physically abusive toward the children. Outside of that, she's just cold with them, withholding affection. I'm bothered by this because, of course, it makes no sense to me why someone would think that treating others poorly actually makes them physically safer. Maybe it selfishly makes Malorie emotionally safer because she's lost a lot and it would be hard for her to trust again after that. That would have been a better motivation for her than that she actually thought it made the children safer. Additionally, after four years raising these children completely alone--raising them from newborns--I find it 100% unrealistic that she wouldn't have developed a strong, loving, affectionate bond with them. She must have had to hold and feed (breastfeed, I'm sure) both of them. It would have been nearly impossible for her to separate herself from the tenderness a mother feels naturally doing that. Also, because she can't draw attention to herself, she must have had to soothe them both often to prevent excessive crying. But the other part that didn't strike me as realistic is how she managed to keep them safe all by herself for so long. She would have had to either leave them alone or bring them along to get supplies. How she did that was skirted over by telling instead of showing, so it didn't play a large part in the tale. But I found it more than a little unlikely.

Still, as a whole I bought the premise of Bird Box and went along with it because it really is a well done story. I was caught up with Malorie's life and the situation, regardless of the dubiousness of the minor moot points I mentioned earlier. Many times while I was reading the book and watching the movie, I thought it worked extremely well that the source of the horror wasn't revealed in more than fleeting glimpses. Often, when a shadowy corner has been brought into the light, we discover there's nothing to fear lurking in it. Instead of heightening the terror by seeing it fully, sighting it dissolves the tension. In this case, it was much better to almost see the monster through the cracks between our fingers--or, more aptly, in peeks stolen through the top or bottom of a blindfold. That puts the reader on a constant knife-edge of uncertainty.

Incidentally, while writing up this review, I discovered a sequel was released in 2021 called Malorie, which I'll be buying ASAP, and hopefully reviewing here sometime in the future. It sounds like with that follow-up, "the reason for all the bloodshed" is finally explored and explained. Additionally, a spin-off sequel called Bird Box Barcelona debuted on Netflix in July 2023. It doesn't star the same cast, though it has exactly the same premise as the previous movie, only with a male parent and his child searching for a refuge from The Problem. I do intend to watch that as well to see if it's any good.

Bird Box is a unique take on horror that should have readers not wanting to put the book down.

Check out my newly released novel!

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series.html

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Vampires Rule

I recently read a novel with an unusual slant on a world ruled by vampires, DAY BOY, by Trent Jamieson. It takes place in a rather dreary post-apocalyptic world. The narrator is a teenage "day boy," a vampire's mortal servant. These vampires suffer from the movie-invented disability of helplessness during the sunlit hours, so they can't get along without human helpers. One thing I admire about this novel is the realistic treatment of predator-prey ratios. The narrator's small town harbors only about five "Masters" (vampires). While they don't normally kill their donors, they still exercise caution about expanding their own numbers.

It's listed on Goodreads here, with reviews, including mine:

Day Boy

Books and films about vampire-dominated worlds too often portray societies overrun by the bloodthirsty undead, with ordinary humans as a small, hunted remnant. There's no way that model would be sustainable unless the vampires can survive on animal blood and/or a reliable supply of bagged blood. For the latter, they would still need human victims to "donate" unless a synthetic substitute has been invented, as in the Sookie Stackhouse series and its TV adaptation, TRUE BLOOD. And even with the artificial blood supply, in that series the undead remain a minority.

S. M. Stirling's Shadowspawn trilogy, beginning with A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, features a subspecies of Homo sapiens who combine the traits of vampires, werebeasts, and sorcerers, with the power to warp reality in their close vicinity as well as control human minds. They aspire to restore the prehistoric Empire of Shadow, when they openly treated the human majority as livestock and slaves. The vampire-shapeshifter species is a tiny minority of the total population, though, as apex predators should be. For instance, in the present the principal antagonist reigns over her own private village where she's the only resident Shadowspawn. Its human residents are well treated, a few supplying her with blood in regular rotation, while most serve her in other capacities or just keep the town running. The blood donors ("lucies") have to endure only one downside to their pampered lifestyle, their mistress's cheerfully sadistic personality.

A 1991 anthology, UNDER THE FANG, collects a variety of original stories on the theme of vampire-dominated societies, including a collaboration between Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas in which Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain and Charnas's Professor Weyland meet in unpleasant circumstances. You can find copies of the book here:

Under the Fang

Considering that vampires are typically envisioned as solitary predators, it seems likely that if they did take over the world, they wouldn't bother with the day-to-day business of ruling. They would probably control human officials who'd do the actual work, while the structures of society would function much as usual, aside from the obligation of catering to the needs of the vampire lords. As Stirling's evil Shadowspawn princess asks in A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, "Do I LOOK like a bureaucrat?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Unimaginable?

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column tackles the issue of scenarios that are allegedly impossible to imagine:

The Unimaginable

The specific scenario he discusses here is the end of capitalism. Lots of authors, he points out (including himself) have written about postcapitalist, sometimes post-scarcity societies. What's hard to imagine, he suggests, is the process of transition from the present to those hypothetical futures. Doctorow cites several examples of SF works that portray postcapitalist worlds, few of which go into detail about how those societies came about, Kim Stanley Robinson being one exception. Would the shift happen through violent revolution or gradual evolution?

Anyway, the job of science-fiction and fantasy writers is to imagine things, however wild or seemingly improbable, right? John Lennon's song "Imagine" claims "it's easy if you try" to conceive of such things as a peaceful Earth with "no possessions," no "greed or hunger," and "nothing to kill or die for." Imagining a utopia (not that I'd want to live in his, since I have doubts of the desirability of a world without countries or possessions, not to mention Lennon's anti-religious slant) may be easy, but visualizing how to get there involves a whole different order of difficulty.

Many, if not most, fictional futures, of course, aren't meant as literal predictions but as cautionary "if this goes on. . ." warnings or optimistic thought experiments in constructing societies better than our own. Few people would want to live in Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE. In the former, the rewriting or obliteration of history as a core policy of the despotic regime deliberately leaves the question of how Big Brother rose to power unanswerable. THE HANDMAID'S TALE (novel) offers a few glimpses of the transition but no detailed account of how we might get from here to there, while the TV series expands on these hints in extended flashbacks but still leaves many questions unanswered.

Although Edward Bellamy claimed his 1888 utopian novel LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000-1887 wasn't intended as a literal plan for political action, a movement to implement his ideas sprang up, in the form of "Nationalist Clubs" active in American politics well into the 1890s. In time Bellamy himself did get involved in this movement, which achieved some practical results before dying out. As attractive as some aspects of Bellamy's vision seem to me, I don't expect to see it become reality, although a few elements exist already—for instance, the cashless society. On the whole, though, over twenty years have passed since 2000, and we're not there yet. Bellamy's faith in the capacity of social structures to change human nature within a generation or two (abolishing greed, violence, etc.) seems naive today. I don't expect a world government such as LOOKING BACKWARD and many near-future SF novels take for granted. However, I wouldn't be surprised if a worldwide confederation similar to the EU eventually developed, but probably not in my lifetime.

One thing I especially like about S. M. Stirling's long-running Emberverse series, beginning with DIES THE FIRE, is that it depicts not only the violent collapse of civilization as we know it, along with the immediate post-apocalyptic scenario, but also the transitional phase experienced by the survivors and their rebuilding of a new society. The series follows the changed world over the course of two generations. We witness how the new world develops into neither a dystopic hellscape, an ideal utopia, nor a duplicate of the old order, but something simply different, better than the present in some ways and worse in others.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Caring About Things Is Cool

In 2005, country singer Jo Dee Messina musically proclaimed, "My Give-a-Damn's Busted." (I still wince at typing that phrase outside of fictional dialogue, even though it's been eighty years since Rhett Butler shocked audiences by speaking it in the final scene of GONE WITH THE WIND.) At a point when current events may tempt many of us to embrace that attitude, Kameron Hurley meditates in her latest LOCUS column on the value of caring about people and causes:

The Power of Giving a Damn

She once believed "it wasn’t cool to care too much about things. Caring about something too hard made you vulnerable. Weak." She attributes this feeling partly to "American cinema and storytelling, much of it geared toward portraying the rugged masculine ideal of the loner hero whose dedication is not to individual humans, but to himself. His world was littered with backstabbing femme fatales and best friends who betrayed him, and the worst parts of humanity were always on display. Don’t care too much about things, these loner-hero stories seemed to say; people will let you down, and humans are just a few steps away from destroying themselves."

This description of the American "loner hero" archetype doesn't sound quite plausible to me. Isn't the classic film image of the solitary, wandering hero more often that of a man who stands alone against injustice, eschewing personal ties to move on to the next town when his task in this place is done? That's the paradigm of the lone gunslinger upon which Stephen King models Roland in the Dark Tower saga (with more complex layers, of course). Or do I have a skewed idea of that figure because I haven't viewed more recent media incarnations of him? (Considering the two examples Hurley offers are FIGHT CLUB and AMERICAN PSYCHO—hardly icons of heroism to be emulated, from what I've read about them—she seems to veer away from her stated emphasis on the lone hero.) She recalls, "I was big on apocalypse movies as a kid, because they advanced this libertarian fantasy that each of us was fully equipped to live a long and productive loner life as long as we kept people away from us."

As an adult, she came to realize the "lie of self-sufficiency." Nobody survives, much less thrives, without depending on the social network, physical infrastructure, and material technology provided by the generations that came before us and the people who work to build and maintain those things. When Thoreau retreated to the woods to live by Walden Pond, he took manufactured tools with him. Even a hermit on a deserted island relies on the products of society; Robinson Crusoe couldn't have gotten far without items he salvaged from the shipwreck. (A gruesome short story by Stephen King imagines the probable fate of a man stuck on a barren island with nothing but his clothes and carry-on bag. The protagonist amputates his own limbs and eats them raw, killing the pain with illegal drugs he happens to be transporting.) In more realistic post-apocalyptic fiction than the type Hurley admired in her teens, the people who survive to rebuild society are those who band together for mutual support.

Discovering, "We are all connected," Hurley summarizes, "I’ve found that it’s not weak­ness to care about others, or to care about a cause. The true weakness is when we are too afraid to care about anything at all." As romance writers, we create worlds in which caring is of central importance and love conquers. That seems like a worthwhile message to promote anytime—especially in the grim times.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Optimistic Disaster Fiction

In the current LOCUS, Cory Doctorow writes about his forthcoming novel WALKAWAY, which he labels a "utopian disaster novel." In a deliberate "rebuttal" of the disaster scenario or post-apocalyptic saga where civilization disintegrates into chaos and most people turn into raging savages the moment our technological infrastructure collapses, he has written a story "about people doing right for one another under conditions of adversity." He describes this book as "a weaponized counternarrative of human goodness":

Weaponized Narrative

After all, in the present state of society, do most people indulge in any greedy, lawless behavior they can get away with? No, says Doctorow, most of us are restrained by our sense of what's normal and decent. Although I applaud his message about empathizing with the people "who are picking up the pieces and starting over again. The helpers" (a term he borrows from Mr. Rogers' famous statement about how to discuss scary news stories with children), the word "weaponized" in the context of celebrating goodness irresistibly reminds me of the maxim, "Fighting for peace is like fornicating for chastity." The imagery contains a certain inherent dissonance. Still, Doctorow deserves praise for rejecting what he calls the "old narrative, the xenophobia story," which "makes crises into tragedies."

A good example of the kind of disaster fiction he favors can be found in one of my favorite series, S. M. Stirling's "Emberverse," which begins with the apocalyptic novel DIES THE FIRE. Granted, civilization does collapse, with a great deal of violence involved. As the inciting catastrophe, every form of advanced technology—electricity, internal combustion, nuclear reactions, gunpowder or any other kind of explosion, steam power—instantaneously and permanently stops working. Our large cities and their surrounding suburbs can't sustain themselves in preindustrial conditions, so of course millions perish horribly. The focus of DIES THE FIRE and the series as a whole, however, centers on the people who work together to save as many of their neighbors as possible and build new communities. Despite the mass die-off, the cannibalism (which we only hear about, not see firsthand), and the brutal gangs that seize power in some areas, this is the most humane and, yes, optimistic post-apocalyptic series I've ever read.

What other examples of optimistic disaster fiction exist in recent fantasy and SF? (With a positive tone overall, that is, not just culminating in a "happy ending" reversal at the conclusion like the "Hunger Games" series.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Snowbound

"Snow-Bound," by nineteenth-century New England Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, was my mother's favorite long poem. (Her favorite short poem was Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Notice a theme?) "The sun that brief December day, Rose cheerless over hills of gray...."

Snow-Bound

Any East Coast readers here? How did you fare during the blizzard? Record inches of snowfall accumulated in this area. Our supermarket was predictably thronged on Friday, as if people expected to be stuck in the house for weeks instead of two or three days at most. (I was there because Friday is my regular grocery day, and I knew going on Thursday instead would have been as bad if not worse.) The stereotypical supplies of bread, milk, and toilet paper weren't noticeably depleted. Kitty litter (presumably bought by people who neglected to stock up on snow-melt powder ahead of time—luckily our cats were NOT in danger of running out this week) and bottled water, however, were stripped from the shelves. And there seemed to have been inexplicable demand for a few strange products, e.g. green onions and plain yogurt. (I managed to get enough of each from the small amounts remaining.) We were very fortunate to escape a power outage. Years ago, we lost electricity for a full 48 hours after an ice storm while the temperature stayed in the twenties (Fahrenheit) the whole time. I never want to do that again. By the time the power came back on, the interior and exterior temperatures had equalized. Pipes froze, but happily they didn't crack. Without electricity, we have no running water because our neighborhood gets its water from wells, not the public system.

And how about the familiar lore of statistical "baby bumps" nine months after a major weather event? I've always thought that was baloney, an urban legend based, if it ever held any truth, on birth patterns in preindustrial societies. It turns out, according to an article I saw a day or two ago, that there's some truth in it. This pattern, if it exists, makes no sense to me. Okay, so couples have unexpected leisure and few options for entertainment. Getting stuck in the house without electricity makes them suddenly forget how to use birth control? Enough people just happen to run out of condoms or contraceptive prescriptions during a snowstorm or hurricane to generate more than a tiny blip in the numbers?

During the present crisis, there have been relatively few highway accidents locally, because citizens paid attention to the mayor's and county executive's pleas to stay off the roads. With 29 inches of snow and drifts piling much higher, by Saturday most people couldn't have left their houses anyhow. We certainly couldn't have. We were snowbound with our computers, televisions, and other modern luxuries. Also with the chore of walking the dog several times a day in snow too deep for my boots; being a St. Bernard, she loved it and seemed baffled that I wouldn't take her any farther than the edge of the front walk.

Whittier's poem, at its heart, is more about nostalgic memories of his childhood and family members who've passed away than about the snowfall itself. In addition, though, the poem does include lots of vivid details about daily life in rural New England in the midst of coping with a blizzard that confined the family to the house for most of a week. It has often occurred to me that people in that kind of environment would have gotten along better during a major winter storm than twenty-first century people deprived of electric power in a similar situation. Whittier's characters already depended on fireplaces, wood stoves, candles, and oil lamps. They would presumably have stocked plenty of fuel for all these. Their wells, unlike ours, didn't rely on electric pumps. In the absence of a medical emergency, a farm family wouldn't need to go anywhere, so impassable roads were only an inconvenience. If they had to leave home for some urgent reason, "The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh..." and a smart horse would refuse to budge if the "white and drifting snow" got too deep. Cars have no judgment (not yet, anyway). The computers, televisions, telephones, etc., that we urgently miss when they fail weren't a factor for our pre-electronic-age ancestors. In "Snow-Bound" the storm causes only one major change in the household routine, the chore of digging a path to the barn to care for the animals. Whittier does mention the ominous gloom of the wintry sky and the fierceness of the blizzard, but once the family gathers inside around the fire, they are cozy and contented. After the storm, people greet with joy the teamsters coming through to clear the road, as we might cheer for the county snowplow. They're happy to receive newspapers after their days of isolation and don't seem upset that the news is a week old.

On one of Michael Longcor's filk albums, he discusses dealing with a power failure after a big winter storm. Because his household was prepared, they were living in the nineteenth century, as he puts it, while most of their neighbors were living in the tenth century. I'm reminded of DIES THE FIRE, the first book in S. M. Stirling's "Emberverse" series, in which all advanced technology ceases to function instantaneously and permanently. (Spoiler: The gods did it to keep humanity from annihilating itself.) My favorite aspect of that book is the vivid, detailed account of how the survivors cope with the reversion to a preindustrial world. I especially enjoy reading about Juniper MacKenzie's Pagan community, which embraces a lifestyle of harmony with the cycles of the seasons. And unlike many post-apocalyptic novels, DIES THE FIRE ends on a note of hope and promise. In the "next generation" stories that follow the first three books of the series, only the elders clearly remember any other way of life.

Nevertheless, I agree with Longcor—I'd much rather read it than live it. I'm very attached to my central heating, running water, electricity, and modern communications.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt