One Second After

Only not quite. On the second day after the cars stop running democracy and the free market are abandoned. Town leadership centralizes food distribution and first doles it out equally but later comes up with a secret plan to make certain pigs more equal to others. Assets (pre-electronic cars mostly) are commandeered to the greater good and college students are conscripted into the military. The praises of local farms are sung and the importance of not becoming reliant on far away food sources are highlighted. Basically the town runs the full socialist playbook.

So whether this book sits on Fox News viewers’ shelves remains a bit of a toss-up as does whether it should on its merits as a story. To be fair, Forstchen’s primary purpose is not to entertain but to scare into action; specifically to have you write you Congressperson to demand electronic ”hardening” against an attack of this nature. Your Congressperson has not been concerned with this since the Reagan years largely because however difficult it may sound to build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), equip it with a monstrous nuclear warhead and then getting it to detonate twenty miles high in the American atmosphere, the actual execution of pulling it off is still far more complex. This is not to say it couldn’t occur thus dooming this insightful and riveting book review to tragic nonexistence (Forstchen scares because he cares).

Thus the book reads long on painful math – nursing home residents die after two days without electronic intervention, alcoholics lose it after two weeks when the liquor runs dry, psychotics run amok after thirty days when the medication runs out and half the population starves sixty days in – and short on actual story. After about 60 days, yes, the inevitable happens, we wind up having to eat each other. Despite Forstchen’s exhaustive and realistic timeline of the bad stuff that happens when our lights eventually do go off, he is a little rosy on this whole having to eat each other thing. Portlier citizens will start looking tasty long before they can drop all the weight.

Focusing on his catalog may be a good decision given the narrative passages come off a little stilted and peculiar. In a particularly awkward passage, the book jumps the shark early when the town leaders tap John our protagonist, former military man but now local college professor of war history and obvious Forstchen stand-in to handle the town’s executions. Sure, because who else but the local history professor to carry out legally mandated shootings? It makes perfect sense. Later on John gives his newly assembled militia a pep talk going into battle by telling them that they are eating while their neighbors and friends starve and that if they lose the battle they are going to be cannibalized by the enemy. Then the chorus sings ”Danny Boy”. Well, William Wallace he is ain’t.

In short, works less as a call to arms against ERP’s and more as a fairly accurate review of the lightly horrors when the lights go out; read The Road instead.