Title: After It's Over
Author: Hunter S. Chadwick
Date: 2022
Publisher: Clarity 4 Truth
ISBN: 9798848118582
Quote: "It didn't have to be this way...This thought came frequently to Reece."
These are the opening lines of a near-future science fiction novel with a twist. Reece isn't going to save the world in the course of this book; he's going to be prepared to be the man of the hour who will, along with a sort of commanding officer, make the effort. What they'll make the effort to do is what readers find out by reading the book. How it will go remains to be disclosed in a sequel.
What readers will love: If they're a most often male type of reader who's not interested in the linguistics or the creative visualization or the philosophy that go into a story, but just want to know what happened, they'll like After It's Over. It's a lean, clean, action-driven story. I don't know whether that type of reader ever reads book blogs, but maybe you know readers like that. They will like this book.
It's been said that when the events in a story are going to be fantastic, the characters need to be as generic as possible; these characters are. Reece is the classic unlikely hero who would have been an ordinary quiet working man if civilization weren't so close to collapse. Al is the older, tougher mentor who takes command as Reece's peaceful neighborhood is forced to become a sort of militia. There's a classic false lover--Shelly Tran, probably named less to suggest Vietnamese ancestry than to suggest that she's a transient acquaintance who never came out of her shell enough to love Reece--and, toward the end of this book, a woman who may be a Real Heroine, and Reece notices a few of his buddies' female relatives enough to know their names, but mostly this is a male-bonding story: While circumstances are as bad as they are, Reece admits, he doesn't want a wife and children. As a result, about all we see of Reece's character is that he doesn't think of himself as heroic and would not voluntarily get into situations that call for heroism, but if he's trapped in that kind of situation, he's not going to let his friends down if he can help it.
There are shoot-out scenes. There is a friend Reece tries to save, but the friend's wound is fatal. There's a good deal of less violent action, working to replace what's been lost, taking road trips in a world with fast-shrinking gas reserves.
There is some religious content. Not much. No character talks about being a Christian. Reece is one, and apparently most of his friends are Christians too.
There is "conservative" political content. No critical race theory; Shelly may be Vietnamese, Juanita is definitely Mexican, and I found myself picturing Big Al being played by Mr. T, but we're not told much about how people look. No concern about classes; in this novel rich people's bad decisions clearly led to the economic depression that is "this way," but well-off people (scientists) may be able to lead everyone back to a better "way," and ordinary people preferred the "way" things were before 2020. Women seem to be smart and tough, and one of them may have solved the central problem of her fictional world, but men still do the shooting. Globalism and the exploitation of the coronavirus panic are the problems the Unlikely Band of Heroes are out to solve.
What some readers will hate: The story doesn't feel self-contained. At the end we don't know whether the couple will be reunited, we don't know whether the possible Real Heroine will be Reece's true love or whether Shelly will improve, and worst of all, we can't be sure that Reece's mission will succeed. We just have to read the sequel.
To celebrate the launch of the said sequel, here's a temporary link you can use to read After It's Over FREE for a short time:
