The Darkness After - Scott B. Williams (2 Stars)

TWO TEENAGERS FIGHT TO SURVIVE IN AN AMERICA GONE DARK When massive solar flares send an intense electromagnetic pulse to Earth, every electrical device is fried instantly. The modern world that sixteen-year-old Mitch Henley has always known comes crashing down. Anarchy, looting and chaos explode all around him. Stranded in New Orleans, Mitch escapes into the Mississippi backwoods he knows so well, hoping to stay alive using the survival and hunting skills he learned from his game-warden father.

Alone and on foot, Mitch sets out to make his way back to the family farm and his younger sister. Not knowing if his parents are dead or alive, nothing else matters . . . until he meets April Gibbs along the way. Smart, beautiful, lethal and alone, she is also making a treacherous trek to find her lost family. They decide to travel together for safety, but neither can begin to imagine the danger that awaits them in the woods.

Set in the same anarchy-and-desperation-reigned world of the author’s dystopian thriller: The Pulse, The Darkness After a frightening look at how fragile our technologically dependent lifestyle really is.

So I read a lot of different books, including stuff that I see recommended on blogs or that's recommended by the library. That's where I came across the book The Darkness After. It had a cool looking cover and an interesting premise, and it didn’t look too long (it was less than 300 pages), so I figured, "Hey, why not?"

Ohmigawsh, you guys, this was the book that would not end! I don't what this guy did—injected it with Sloth-Berry Juice or, I dunno, forgot to the existence of contractions, maybe—but this book just dragged on and on and on. I got about a quarter of the way in and wanted to quit, but I didn’t so that I could write about why this book bothered me so much and show all of you guys what not to do with your own work.

Before we continue, I have to say, the book wasn’t bad. The characters were nice people, the premise was pretty interesting, no one did anything that made me hate them who was a good guy (plenty of bad guys, though). The pacing wasn’t bad, either. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was, it was so dry. It felt like I was reading a textbook. Part of that was the lack of contractions, which can really help give writing a sense of immediacy when you need it. And this book needed it because the book had lots of danger, lots of bad guys and problems and things going totally south, but except for the prologue (which was like, 2 pages) and the first few pages of chapter one, the danger had no immediacy. It was like the book was being read by Ben Stein. I had Ben Stein in my head! Do you know how shudder-worthy that is?

So the biggest problem was dryness. When the characters are being shot at, it's supposed to stir the blood, make the reader gasp and say, "Oh, no!" But it didn't. It was like reading a news report written by a robot. And it wasn’t that I didn’t care about the characters. Mitch and April seem like nice people and I wanted them to reach their goals—Mitch getting to his sister to look after her and April getting to her infant daughter. I really wanted to root for them because I liked them as people, but it was almost like they were telling me, "Yeah, I gotta…like, go rescue my family. It's just a thing real quick. Yeah, I can wait while we have a drink" (heard in one of those monotonous stoner-voices). The writer told me they had these goals, that these goals were important to them…but I wasn’t feeling it.

The second thing: the dialogue was terrible. I have never heard teenagers talk like that (Mitch is fifteen, April is eighteen). And April says things like, "Gosh, I just really feel I have to get to my baby. She is all I can think of right now. I cannot think of anything else. I just want to find my baby and make sure she is all right." Mitch talks like that, too, minus the parts about the baby. But the dialogue is stilted and very adult-like (if the adult were an android). I kept face-palming and making weird expressions that made my husband laugh and my cats look at me funny while I read it.

And the final thing: April regarding her baby. I like that she actually cares about her kid instead of being like, "Oh, well." I do like that. But the author takes it overboard with how he writes it. It's very…if the way April talked about her baby was improve-script for a movie or a play, the director would accuse her of overacting. Not that the bond between mother and child isn't an incredibly strong one, because it totally is. But the way the author wrote it reads fake. It's almost as if he wrote what he assumed mothers were like, but never actually stopped to ask one.

A good example, actually, is this mother duck I saw on Tumblr. She'd popped up onto the curb and half her babies were with her but the other half were stuck on the side of the road on the asphalt. And this guy sees her and grabs a box or something and sets it down next to the curb so the ducklings could hop up there and then get to the curb. And at first the duck is totally losing her mind. She flares her wings and waddles toward him, and if she spoke English instead of Duck she probably would've said, "Get the f*** away from my babies, you sick son of a…" And then she sees he's helping and backs off, like, "Oh. Thank you, kind sir."

I sort of expected April to be like that—like Sarah Connor in Terminator II. And April's had combat training and stuff from her dad, and she can handle herself, so this isn't an unreal expectation, but for the most part, we never see her act on her supposed need to get to her kid. She just talks about it, really. Stuff like I mentioned above, "Oh, I just simply have to get to my baby. I just need to hold her in my arms. She must be so frightened." Most of the times that April reacts like a tigress, it's when she's in serious danger of probably dying, and again, the action sequences lack immediacy, so that's not really that impressive anyway.

All in all, this book's problem was the technical aspect of the writing, not the plot. I don't normally run into that sort of thing. So I'm giving it 2/5 stars, winning the two stars for plot and likeable characters. But I had to practically chew through this book (and I like Tolkien and Shakespeare, so wordage isn't the problem) and I kind of wanted to gouge out my eyes by the time I sat down to write this review. My reward to myself is a cookie—my roommate made them and they're delicious.

Saluting you with my cinnamon-sugar cookie,

LA Knight