re: #112 Justanotherhuman

I felt that way about The Road, also. When a destroyed civilization’s remaining survivors have descended into such acts as roasting infants for food to stay alive, why would you want to survive, or have your child survive, in such a bleak, destroyed landscape?

I just read a pretty decent book in that same dystopian genre called Rivers, a first novel by Michael Farris Smith.

It’s set at some point in the future, after the entire Gulf Coast area has been declared a permanent disaster area. Years of ferocious storms have caused the government to draw a boundary some 90 miles north of the coastline. At some point it was simpler to not rebuild any more, and if you chose to stay down there instead of heading for safer territory, you were on your own — there is no law any more, and the storms have effectively shuttered all forms of mass communication.

“It beat against the roof and it beat into the church where pieces of roof were missing above the choir loft and the baptismal. He rolled under a pew, his shoulder throbbing as the hail attacked the earth and what was left of the church, the sound of a hundred hardworking men and their sledgehammers. The lightning snapped and the crack of snapping wood and the scurrying of four-legged creatures sharing the church with him. He rolled over onto his stomach and crossed his good arm and put his head down and his other arm lay limp at his side. More thunder and more lightning and more hail as he lay shivering.”

It’s dark, but not quite as bleak as The Road
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I’ve read a lot of books this year, but I haven’t read one I’ve liked better.