Book Review: Paul M. Feeney's The Last Bus

The Last Bus by Paul M. Feeney is a B-movie novella with big budget fun.  Feeney takes a typical, prosaic situation and invests it with dread, scares, and pathos the way good horror stories do, and leaves you at the end hoping for more.

Told from the point of view of multiple characters, it tells a story of the first few harrowing hours of a hostile alien invasion, with all the death and destruction such an event would entail.  Several interludes are interspersed within the narrative, describing the horrible nature of the aliens and what they do to and with innocent victims.  I found most of these interludes to be a bit distracting, taking the emphasis from the characters on the eponymous bus to a number of strangers you know won't survive the hour.  Nevertheless, they're well-written and help increase the overall feeling of dread.

After reading The Last Bus, you won't go on public transport again without doing a quick assessment of your fellow passengers, determining if they're going to be help or harm during an alien invasion.  It's vivid, gory, horrifying, and exciting.  Just what you'd want for a few hours of horror entertainment.