Book Review: Five Years After, by William R. Forstchen
The post-apocalyptic prepper trilogy has become a series.
Forge Books, 2023, 352 pages
From William R. Forstchen, the New York Times bestselling author of the One Second After series, comes Five Years After, a near-future thriller where John Matherson must contend with new threats to the fragile civilization that he helped rebuild.
Five years after The Final Day, the Republic of New America has all but collapsed into regional powers and the world at large is struggling to remain stable as regional conflicts ravage the post EMP landscape. After several years attempting to lead a quiet life, John Matherson receives the news that the President is dying from a possible assassination attempt, and is asked to step in to negotiate with what appears to be a new military power hidden in the wreckage of the world.
Pulled back into the fray, John struggles to hold the tottering Republic together. Facing threats on multiple fronts, he races against time to stop another EMP attack on the former United States and China, putting years of progress at risk. With so much of his work under threat, John must find the strength within to start over, so that he can save the country and the people that he holds dear from even greater calamity.
The first book in this series was One Second After, which was a pretty gripping post-apocalyptic novel about industrial civilization falling apart after EMP bursts take out most of the Western world.
The next two books featured John Matherson rebuilding a community in Black Mountain while remnants of the Washington bureaucracy try to reform a federal government. They began to tilt increasingly right-wing, with NWO plots and a Hillary Clinton caricature as a villain. I thought the third book was the last, but here comes book four, Five Years After, and the way it ends leaves it pretty open-ended.
As the title suggests, it's now five years after "The Day" in which the old world died. Most of the world is still a hellhole, as is most of the former United States. Black Mountain has managed to become somewhat self-sufficient and able to fight off the occasional marauder bands, while the "New Republic" of which John Matherson is ostensibly the Vice President is struggling to assert order over a portion of the East Coast.
Then it turns out there's a secret underground bunker with thousands of well-fed soldiers who've been hiding there since The Day, with enough food and medicine stockpiled for the next fifty years. When they emerge, led by a mysterious military officer with a shelf full of books by Nietzsche, it can't be anything good.
As in the last book, Matherson spends most of this one trying to stay true to his principles while alternatively being offered carrots and threatened with sticks. There isn't quite so much lefty-bashing in this volume, and the scale of the story expands as one of the primary conflicts is with China, which is having problems of its own but has still managed to occupy the West Coast, and is being held off from further expansion only by the existence of four nuclear submarines still under "American" control.
This was like the previous books in the series, a quick read with a lot of tension but rather melodramatic dialog and a plot that's a bit Hollywood.
Also by William R. Forstchen: My reviews of One Second After, One Year After, and The Final Day.
My complete list of book reviews.
Forge Books, 2023, 352 pages
From William R. Forstchen, the New York Times bestselling author of the One Second After series, comes Five Years After, a near-future thriller where John Matherson must contend with new threats to the fragile civilization that he helped rebuild.
Five years after The Final Day, the Republic of New America has all but collapsed into regional powers and the world at large is struggling to remain stable as regional conflicts ravage the post EMP landscape. After several years attempting to lead a quiet life, John Matherson receives the news that the President is dying from a possible assassination attempt, and is asked to step in to negotiate with what appears to be a new military power hidden in the wreckage of the world.
Pulled back into the fray, John struggles to hold the tottering Republic together. Facing threats on multiple fronts, he races against time to stop another EMP attack on the former United States and China, putting years of progress at risk. With so much of his work under threat, John must find the strength within to start over, so that he can save the country and the people that he holds dear from even greater calamity.
The first book in this series was One Second After, which was a pretty gripping post-apocalyptic novel about industrial civilization falling apart after EMP bursts take out most of the Western world.
The next two books featured John Matherson rebuilding a community in Black Mountain while remnants of the Washington bureaucracy try to reform a federal government. They began to tilt increasingly right-wing, with NWO plots and a Hillary Clinton caricature as a villain. I thought the third book was the last, but here comes book four, Five Years After, and the way it ends leaves it pretty open-ended.
As the title suggests, it's now five years after "The Day" in which the old world died. Most of the world is still a hellhole, as is most of the former United States. Black Mountain has managed to become somewhat self-sufficient and able to fight off the occasional marauder bands, while the "New Republic" of which John Matherson is ostensibly the Vice President is struggling to assert order over a portion of the East Coast.
Then it turns out there's a secret underground bunker with thousands of well-fed soldiers who've been hiding there since The Day, with enough food and medicine stockpiled for the next fifty years. When they emerge, led by a mysterious military officer with a shelf full of books by Nietzsche, it can't be anything good.
As in the last book, Matherson spends most of this one trying to stay true to his principles while alternatively being offered carrots and threatened with sticks. There isn't quite so much lefty-bashing in this volume, and the scale of the story expands as one of the primary conflicts is with China, which is having problems of its own but has still managed to occupy the West Coast, and is being held off from further expansion only by the existence of four nuclear submarines still under "American" control.
This was like the previous books in the series, a quick read with a lot of tension but rather melodramatic dialog and a plot that's a bit Hollywood.
Also by William R. Forstchen: My reviews of One Second After, One Year After, and The Final Day.
My complete list of book reviews.