SNEAK PEAK: The World I Woke Up To

Hi boys and girls!

It's National Novel Writing Month. and in honor of that I have a special preview of my next novel, The World I Woke Up To. It's still very much a work in progress, I'm just over halfway through the first draft. I hope to have it done and published by this time next year.

Here's a brief description:

Kaylee Crawford has always been more comfortable in the company of animals than people, and when neglectful owners dump a big black dog named Beast at the shelter where she volunteers, she feels a special connection to the remarkable animal...one that will come in very handy when, in a horrifying instant, it's not the animals she has to worry about biting her...

As the world collapses around her, she must fight to survive and keep her younger brother safe. As they and new companions both two and four legged embark on an perilous journey to escape the carnage and find sanctuary, Kaylee is forced to wonder: is anywhere truly safe in this brave new world?




Elizabeth City, NC


“What’s going on?” Danny called out behind her.


“Tammy says there’s a marina on the other side of this bridge, if we can get the bridge down we might be able to secure a boat and get the hell out of this place. We have most definitely overstayed our welcome.”

“How are we going to get the cages on the boat?” Danny asked, skeptical of this new plan.

Kaylee sighed. “Cross that bridge when we come to it.” She gestured to the open bridge span. “So to speak.”

They walked up to the door to the bridge control station. Beast walked up first, sniffing. He didn’t seem to be alarmed, and that gave Kaylee some confidence that the coast was clear. She twisted the knob and the door creaked open on rusty hinges. Both trained their guns out in front of them as Kaylee used the flashlight app on her phone to scan the area. The room was clear, so they made their way to the control panel. To their shared dismay, neither saw anything resembling a mechanical backup to the electrical system used to raise and lower the bridge.

Suddenly she heard barking. “The dogs on the trailer,” she thought out loud. A shot of panic ran through her veins. They’d left the vehicles and the two people least able to defend themselves with only a pistol and a sword. Forgetting about the bridge, she ran back out the door onto the road, looking for signs of danger. She stopped to get a better look, but the world around her was pitch dark and the light from her flashlight had impaired her natural night vision.

Danny quickly caught up to her. “See anything?”

“I can’t see shit. Too damn dark.” She switched on the the NVG’s and held them up. She gasped. In the glowing green light she could see figures standing on the roofs of the buildings across the street. All perfectly still, all watching them intently.

“They’re on the roof,” Kaylee said quietly, fighting the fear rising up in her.

“What are they doing?”

“They’re...they’re just standing there. Watching us.”

“Well, if they’re playing it cool we will too. Walk slowly to the truck, start it up, and get a move on. We’ll cover your exit, and be right behind you.”

“Why are they..why aren’t they attacking? There’s at least a dozen of them up there.”

“Don’t know, don’t care. I just want to get the hell away from them.”

They made their way back to the cars, trying not to look up at the roofs too much. Kaylee climbed into the cab and started the engine.

“What’s going on? What’s got the dogs all worked up?”

“The rooftops of the buildings immediately behind us are crawling with infected,” Kaylee said as calmly as she could manage.

“So they don’t see us yet?”

“Oh, they see us all right.”

“Then why aren’t they attacking?”

“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question now, isn’t it?” She backed the truck and trailer up, or tried to at least. It took her several frustrating tries to get into a position to continue straight on Water Street. She saw the 4-Runner start to follow along as she picked up speed, then watched in fascinated horror as figures began falling from the sky. They jumped from the two story rooftops and landed in crouching stances, then got to their feet and started after the two vehicles. Why now!? Why did they wait til we left to attack? This made no sense…

Well, that's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates, and look for my next book review, The Rules of Supervilliany, coming up in the next few weeks.


-Mike, out.

The Last Ship, reviewed.

And now for something completely different...

Today rounds out my literary tour of the apocalypse. We've seen the improbable alien invasions and the laughable army of mantis men, and now we take a sharp detour into the terrifying specter of a nuclear war, a prospect perhaps more pressing now than any time since the end of the Cold War, with US and Russian combat aircraft now operating on opposing sides in the war-torn clusterf**k that is the Middle East. So with that happy thought, welcome aboard The Last Ship, by William Brinkley.

I usually save my reviews for young adult fiction, though I read plenty of adult fiction too. Can't honestly say why I've decided to add this book in here. I suppose it is a book that will make you want to talk about it. Regardless, this book is very far from being YA, both in difficulty and subject matter. 

In the closing years of the 20th century, the nuclear-powered destroyer USS Nathan James is on patrol in the Barents Sea when something both unthinkable, and yet, felt by many of her crew as inevitable, happens: they receive orders to launch some of their nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missiles at their target city of Orel in Russia. This they do, and then proceed out of the Barents Sea to find the world in ashes. Their war lasted four hours, and that was the easy part. They will now embark on a nearly year long voyage around a world they no longer recognize, where deadly radiation has turned the land to poisonous wasteland, and turned the few survivors they find there, both human and animal, into the walking dead, already decomposing even though they will live on for a few more days or weeks. With their homeland presumed lost, their mission now becomes finding some bit of uncontaminated land that will support them before their nuclear fuel runs out and they become a ghost ship, forever lost at sea. 

The book's narrative is told from the perspective of her captain, Tom (given the last name Chandler on the TNT series, here never named), and he is a vividly sketched character. We see him whole, his decisive outward demeanor and inward neuroses and vanity, his strengths and weakness, hopes and fears. We see him growl at a mutinous subordinate, "Get off my ship." We see him cry after sex (which, fair warning, we see in graphic and rather crude detail. I'm not opposed to depictions of sex in fiction, but I've noticed that male authors, as a general rule, seem to have a lot of trouble writing it well.) 

In fact many of the characters in this book are rich and well drawn, as is the world they inhabit. It's a very immersive book. At first you may have some questions about Captain Tom, given the admiring, almost leering way he describes the physiques of his male crewmembers, and how he "knows nothing of women" and was initially horrified when he learned he would be commanding one of the first mixed crews (the book was written in 1988, shortly after the Navy first opened sea-going billets to women). Tom changes his tune fairly quickly once they are aboard and quickly prove themselves equal to their male peers. One in particular will become especially important. More on her later. 

Captain Tom is also very long winded and has apparently decided to preserve every single word in the English language. If you know me IRL, you know I have made a fairly lucrative career of making myself seem smarter than I really am with the use of a very large vocabulary, so it's been a very long time since I've read a book that sent me reaching for a dictionary so often. One reviewer said that Brinkley never uses a fifty cent word when a two dollar word can be found, so if you're not a fan of big words, or small, difficult words, steer clear. It's also strange, the manner in which he narrates and how everyone speaks. Captain Tom in particular sounds like an 18th century sea captain, more than a digital age Navy man, like a Patrick O'Brien book that swapped sailing frigates for guided missile destroyers. The book is also over 600 pages, the audiobook version weighing in at a crushing 30 hours. None the less, I found myself not being particularly anxious for it to be over, so engrossing the was the story. 

The book is often very poignant, this mostly due to the interaction between the James and the Russian missile submarine Pushkin, which they first encounter off the coast of France. The ease at which the two crews, from nations that just destroyed each other, integrate and come together to eventually form a single community, a single crew, highlights how pointless and unnecessary the war was. You keep expecting tension or outright conflict, but it never comes. We never find out what started the war or who fired first, and both captains seem to agree it doesn't matter. Everyone lost. 

Tom's chief concern, sometimes it would seem more than nuclear fallout or diminishing fuel and supplies or mutinous crew members or violent storms or even a serial killer among ship's company, is the rather lopsided ratio of men to women, and the fact the surviving crew of these two ships may very well constitute the only hope for perpetuating the human race. The book spends an inordinate amount of time working out the logistics of what the crew comes to term "the arrangement", and it's a little off-putting. 

A slight detour into rant territory: At one point during the voyage a female crew member is subject to a violent assault, sadly not that uncommon in real life among women in the military, nor, rather shockingly, even among men. The captain's reaction, however, is diametrically opposed to what typically happens in the real world. In real life these incidents are often squashed, swept under the rug, the perpetrator going free or perhaps a slap on the wrist. They are never marooned on a highly radioactive island, left to die a slow horrible death of radiation sickness or avail themselves to the .45 service pistol the captain so thoughtfully left him. In fiction you often see these violent revenge fantasies towards rapists, yet in real life this is almost never the case. I find this dichotomy puzzling, though I have no explanation for it. I was also put off by the fact the offending sailor is never named, though it makes sense from the Captain's perspective, not want to attribute humanity to a person he has condemned to such a fate. 

One other rant. As I mentioned, many of the characters are well drawn, and perhaps none more so (besides Captain Tom) than Lieutenant Gerrard, the ship's supply officer and highest-ranking female officer aboard (and while we get to know her, ahem, intimately, I don't recall ever hearing her first name. Regardless she is one of the most compelling, best-written supporting female characters I've ever read in fiction...right until the end when Brinkley completely throws her under the bus, in a shocking act so out of character and so inexplicable it nearly ruins the whole book. I got to the finale and wanted to flip a table.  

But while I can't quite forgive that, and for all its other flaws, I still really enjoyed this book. I can't say I truly enjoyed my time at sea, but it surely had its moments, and this book often made me nostalgic for having a steel deck under my feet, watching the sunset over the water from the bridge wing. 

Like the other two books in my apocalyptic book tour, this one has also been been adapted to the screen, though as a TV show and not a movie. While I have come to enjoy the TV show in its own right, if you have come to the book by way of the show, understand they are nothing alike, and the show took only the title and the name of the ship, and the first name of the captain.

-Mike, out.