The Silence by Tim Lebbon (2015, Titan Books)

The quiet earth

The Silence (2015) is a brief, enjoyable doomsday horror adventure.

This type of novel usually breaks down in three parts. My favorite is invariably the first section: characters introduced, points of view established, small peripheral intimations of trouble and rumors of trouble. Crises quickly develop, emergency services and experts are overwhelmed, and our protagonists must work together to find safety, all the while being picked-off as remorselessly as Agatha Christie dinner guests.

Lebbon alternates point-of-view between a father and his deaf teen daughter. The daughter Ally's sections are first person; those focusing on Huw, the dad, are written in third-person.

Additionally, Lebbon heads each chapter with select transcripts from Twitter or newscasts to provide a third viewpoint.

Lebbon begins chapter six:

     There is evidence that the spread of the creatures popularly known as "vesps" is slowing. Contact has been made with all affected governments, and policies put in place. Great Britain is as prepared as it can be, and we have one distinct advantage over our European neighbours—we are an island. There is no evidence of the infestation crossing large bodies of water. Our message to you at this time is as follows:

     1. Do not leave home. Mass migration is not the answer, and may impede the ability of military or emergency personnel to travel where required.

     2. Continue monitoring the BBC News channels—television, online, and radio—through which all government statements will be released.

     3. Do not panic. All necessary measures are being taken to combat the threat.

     BBC News Emergency Broadcast, Friday, 18 November 2016 (repeated hourly)

     What a heap of fucking shit.

     BBC Newscaster, Friday, 18 November 2016 (her final broadcast)

Lebbon  contextualizes the crisis without omniscient authorial intrusion. Every generalization, false step, and estimate of a situation flows from character.

One of the most compelling early scenes takes place on the last day of school:

     My first lesson was geography. I always enjoyed the lesson, and liked even more that I got to sit next to Rob. But as soon as I saw him I knew that something was wrong.

     "What is it?" I signed. Sometimes I liked the fact that Rob and I could have secret conversations in the midst of a crowd.

     "That news," he replied. "The cave. Those weird things that came out of it. They've spread. It's all over the TV. And my cousin is in the army, based in Malta. He sent a text to his mum, she sent it to Dad, and he just forwarded it to me." He took out his phone and held it out to me. We weren't supposed to bring phones into the classrooms, but everyone did.

     I read the text on the screen:

     Been mobilised. Thing in Moldova bigger than they're saying.

     "Bloody hell," I said.

     Rob nodded. He was not his usual casual self. The frown did not suit him.

     "Sir?" I asked, hand raised.

     Mr Bellamy pointed to me and nodded. He was one of those who found it awkward, even uncomfortable, communicating with me. He was also a mumbler. I could barely see his lips moving, let alone read them, and he could not sign.

     "Can we talk about that thing in Moldova today?"

     Mr Bellamy smiled and spread his arms wide, said something, and most of the class turned to look at me. I glanced sidelong at Rob.

     "He said that's exactly what he was going to do anyway."

     I smiled at the teacher. He clapped his hands once and the class faced front again. He spoke to some of them, blinds were drawn, and one of the girls went to sit at the front of the class to work the computer. Mr Bellamy fussed with the remote control for the ceiling projector, then a square of flickering light appeared on the whiteboard.

     I prepared myself for another incomplete lesson. The teachers were great, and if they knew I wouldn't be able to follow a lesson completely—if, for instance, they were talking about a lot of stuff instead of displaying it all on whiteboards—they'd have a printout ready at the end of the period. I'd come to terms with the fact that my schooling took up about twenty per cent more time than my fellow pupils', because I spent an hour or two after coming home every evening reading printouts. If there was anything I didn't understand, the teachers were usually available during free lessons to help. Some were better than others, and Mr Bellamy was one of the few who found dealing with me problematic.

     The first image appeared on the whiteboard. It showed a cutaway section through a cave system, and I wondered if I was the first to notice what made it unique—there seemed to be no entrance.

     I could see Mr Bellamy starting to talk, and Rob tapped my arm. He started signing for me.

     "Let's start with a different cave to the one we saw on the news yesterday. Movile Cave in Romania was discovered by construction workers in 1986. They were drilling to assess whether the remote area was suitable for a new power station, broke through into an underground passage, and immediately sealed it up again. What scientists discovered when they ventured down was a cave system that had been cut off from the outside world for millions of years. What surprised them more was the unique ecosystem that existed down there. Apparently, it's an arachnophobe's worst nightmare." The class laughed. I focused on Rob's hands, his mouth, his facial expressions. I liked it when he signed for me; he became mine.

     "There are no stalactites in the cave, so no evidence of water ingress. The atmosphere is only ten per cent oxygen. And there's no evidence of radioactive isotopes from the Chernobyl disaster. That convinced scientists that what they'd found was a genuinely isolated ecosystem, completely enclosed from the outside world. Some of what they found down there… remarkable." Rob nodded forward and I looked.

     The projections changed every few seconds. Images of strange spiders, scorpion-like creatures, snails, spring-tailed insects, millipedes and worms, all of them ghostly white and eyeless. Some of them seemed almost transparent, their insides visible.

     Rob touched my hand as Mr Bellamy continued.

     "Only a handful of scientists have been down into the cave. It's such a difficult environment to work in, with oxygen levels so low your kidneys will fail within a couple of hours, and the heat is almost unbearable. Quite an amazing place."

     A cross-section of the cave appeared on the screen and he used a light pen to point at particular features.

     "It's estimated that the caverns had been cut off from the outside world for over five million years. In that time the species within have evolved and become quite unique. It's a perfect example of Darwinian evolution, actually. There were plants and creatures that were found nowhere else on the planet. Many were familiar, but some necessitated whole new classifications."

     The picture showed a milky-white spider, bloated and moist, mandibles dark-tipped and seemingly ready to snap from the screen.

     "Eww," I said, and I saw other pupils laughing in equal disgust.

     Mr Bellamy fell silent as the slideshow of images continued, one picture fading out as the next faded in.

     A fern-like plant, the edges of its pale leaves glimmering with moisture or mineral deposits. A small beetle, its shell a soft-looking pale yellow. Several types of fungi.

     "It's just one of several such sites around the world," Mr Bellamy said. "That we've discovered, at least. And the system in Moldova is the latest." He fell silent again as the screen turned to white. He seemed to be staring at the wall, lost for words. The pupils glanced around at each other, a few of them smiling, most a little worried.

     "Sir?" I saw one of them say.

     Mr Bellamy used the remote to turn off the projector. He turned to face us, and I'd never seen him looking so old. His face was grey, eyes dark. It was as if he'd returned from seeing something terrible without ever having left the classroom.

     "I've always worried about things like this," he said. "When I was your age it was the idea of space exploration that troubled me. But as I learned more, it became obvious that there were countless places still on Earth that were yet to be discovered. Ecosystems are just that—systems. Whole, complete, sometimes in turmoil, yet usually, eventually, balanced. Introduce one unique ecosystem to another and the result is unknown. And as the world becomes smaller with advances in communication and travel, so remote dangers come closer."

     One of the kids put their hand up and spoke, and Rob signed for me.

     "Like with Aids?"

     Mr Bellamy nodded. "Just like with Aids. Some of what are known as the hot viruses, too. Ebola, Marburg. Roads were built deep into the wilds of Africa; lifelines for many, but routes along which diseases and contagion could travel much, much faster than nature itself could spread them. Isolated valleys were explored and plundered." He stopped again, trying to smile to see away his seriousness. But the smile only made it worse. "I always worried," he said again.

     "So what do you think has happened?" I asked.

     Mr Bellamy looked at me, and this time he spoke clearly, for me, so that I saw the answer on his own lips. "We'll find out soon."

Lebbon clearly enjoys exploring ways each member of Huw and Ally's family rise to meet their portion of global carnage. Ally at first seems the most vulnerable because she is deaf. Huw is initially relieved to let his more masterful and accomplished friend Glenn take the lead. BothHuw and spouse Kelly have at the outset been accommodating themselves to the stupefying routines of adulthood and parenthood. Jude, Ally's obnoxious younger brother, is caught in preteen contrariness. Lynne, Kelly's mother, has lived life independently and on her own uncompromising terms.

One of Lebbon's many strengths as a writer is his ability in a novel of modest length to track how each family member learns better. Those who survive must grow.  And grow-up quickly.

The Silence lets its flying monsters loose early, and readers will enjoy that chaotic creature-feature spectacle. The humans-are-the-real-monsters petty bourgeois moralizing is left to three late chapters, and efficiently compartmentalized.

The unstable and tentative new equilibrium protagonists find in the last pages of this type of doomsday fiction allows Lebbon's survivors some very circumspect optimism.

Still, finishing The Silence, I could not help recalling the last lines of Pat Frank's 1959 nuclear doomsday novel Alas, Babylon, where the human remnant turns "to face the thousand-year night."

Jay

16 October 2021

Reading: Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene (Leisure, 2010)

"I don't care where the light leads. I'd just like to see it one more time."

Darkness on the Edge of Town

by Brian Keene (Leisure, 2010) 

Walden, Virginia is a smallish town like many others. Until the morning its citizens wake to find the world gone: No phones, no radio, no TV, no water, and no power; no sunlight, no starlight, and nothing outside the town limits that means well for its inhabitants. 

"Walden," of course, is a watchword in U.S. history and culture. For Thoreau it was a place of hard work, retreat and reflection, a place where one could "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

Keene's narrator, young Robbie Higgins, would not be mistaken for Thoreau, just as Walden, VA is a long way from Concord, MA and nearby Walden pond. But both, ultimately, tell their own story and tell it true.

❖

Darkness on the Edge of Town displays Keene's passionate curiosity for how working class people confront and negotiate, along with their companions and friends, the end of the world. His characters are sharp, his prose is economical, and the first-person narration is carefully executed .

Even in the early chapters, when the extent of the crisis is still uncertain, Robbie and his comrades are on their guard. These are not fools, as we see when they approach the dark barrier at the edge of town.

     After I opened the door and got out of the Pontiac, Russ and Christy did the same. We shut the doors quietly and moved slowly. The air felt heavy. Oppressive, like before a summer storm. I'd parked the car so that the headlights were pointed into the darkness beyond the sign, but it didn't do much good. It was like the beams were hitting a wall. Just beyond the road sign, the blackness swallowed them up.

     It's hard to describe something that's not describable, but fuck it—I'll give it a shot. Imagine that you're sitting in a dark room at night with no lights or candles or anything else for a source of light. Imagine that there's darkness all around you. Total and complete darkness. Okay? Now imagine that just beyond that darkness is a different kind of darkness, blacker than the rest of the darkness around you. It seems to have substance, even though you know it doesn't. It's like tar or India ink. It ripples when you look at it out of the corner of your eye, or maybe it seems to shimmer. You can see the change with your naked eye—the razor line where mere gloom changes into obsidian.

     That's what it was like, standing there in the middle of the road.

     "Jesus…" Christy's whisper seemed to dissipate, as if the darkness were swallowing sound like it did the headlights.

     Russ clicked on his flashlight, shined it into the impenetrable blackness, and stepped forward. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

     "Don't go near it."

     "Why not?"

     "Because it's wrong. Don't you feel it?"

     Russ stared at me for a moment without responding, then shrugged me off and turned back to the curtain's edge. He moved the flashlight around, directing the beam at different angles into the gloom. Finally, he spoke.

     "This is some fucking weird shit, guys."

     Christy and I nodded in agreement. I was about to respond when Christy silenced us.

     "Listen," she said.

     We did.

     At first I didn't hear anything. But after maybe thirty seconds, I noticed that there were sounds in the darkness. They started out quiet but grew louder as we listened—slithering noises, growls and grunts and muted, warbling shrieks. All sounded as if they were coming from a long distance away. Some of the noises sounded human. Others didn't. But in addition to those sounds, each of us heard something else, too. The darkness spoke to us. It whispered to us with familiar voices long unheard. Later, when we compared notes, we learned that each of us had heard something different.

     The darkness spoke to Christy with her father's voice. He'd died of a sudden heart attack two years earlier. Secretly I'd always thought that his death had a lot to do with Christy's dependence on drugs and alcohol. I mean, we both liked to party, but for her, the partying had become something more after her father passed away.

     Russ heard his ex-wife's voice in the darkness, which was funny, he said, since before that moment, he hadn't heard from her in more than twelve years. He didn't know anything about her, other than she'd moved to North Carolina and started a new life without him, but now it was like she was hiding in the shadows and calling his name.

     For me, the darkness sounded like my grandfather. I never knew my dad, and my mom worked two jobs to provide for me, so my grandparents pretty much raised me. I didn't mind. They were both good people, and I'd loved them very much. Me and Mom lived with them. I slept in Mom's old room, and she slept on the couch. When I was little, my grandfather was my best friend. We built extensive, highly detailed model train dioramas on top of his workbench, outfitting them with little houses and trees and fake grass and tiny cars. When I was twelve, he took me on a trip to Norfolk to see the navy ships heading out to sea, and another time, he took me on a weekend visit to Colonial Williamsburg. In the summertime, he used to take me out on the back roads in his car. When we got to a place where there was no traffic, I'd sit on his lap and he'd let me drive the car. He'd work the gas and brake while I steered. I'd loved him, and still did....

         "Hello, Robbie," he said. "Come and give your grandpa a big hug."

     I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry. My tongue and lips felt like they were swelling. The smells grew stronger.

     "Come on," he insisted. "It's been so long. I've missed you."

     He held out his arms to me the way he used to, and I remembered how safe I'd felt with them wrapped around me, squeezing. I didn't feel that way now, and I imagined that if I went to him, the squeeze would be something less than tender or caring. I stayed where I was. In truth, I don't know if I could have moved even if I'd wanted to. My feet felt like they were ankle deep in cement. I glanced over at Russ and Christy. They both stared into the darkness, gaping in the same direction as I'd been, but judging from their reactions, neither was seeing what I saw. I wondered what they were seeing instead. Then I turned back to my grandfather and he smiled.

     "Go away," I whispered.

     "Come on, Robbie," he urged again. "At least come over here where I can see you better. You're all grown up now. All that blond hair and those blue eyes. You look like your mother when she was your age."

     He beckoned. The darkness seemed to flow around him like ripples in a black, oily pool.

     "Go away," I repeated, closing my eyes. "Please go away. You're not my grandfather. You're not real. You can't be. You died."

     "I'm real," he said. "Touch me, Robbie. Feel me. I'm solid."

     I opened my eyes. His eyes seemed to blaze with that cold light. It flared and sparked around his frame, billowing from his head and shoulders and fingertips. He still hadn't moved.

     But Russ had. While my eyes were shut, he'd shuffled toward the darkness. He stretched his arms, reaching for something I couldn't see. He had a shocked, confused smile on his face.

     "But why didn't you call?" Russ peered into the shadows. "If you had just let me know you were coming, I could have picked you up at the airport."

     I glanced in the direction he was staring. There was nothing there that I could see. I turned to Christy, but she seemed oblivious to us both. Weeping, she knelt in the middle of the road, wiped her eyes and nose with her hands, and repeated, "I'm sorry," over and over again.

     "Don't be silly," Russ said, smiling. "It's no trouble at all."

     "Robbie," my grandfather called. "Don't worry about them right now. I need you to come closer. It's hard to see you."

     Ignoring him, I ran after Russ. He was just a few feet away from that thin razor line where the darkness became the absence of light. His smile had grown broader, and he nodded in response to something I couldn't hear.

     "Sounds good to me," he said. "I missed you, too. You don't know how much. Let's go back to my place. The past is the past."

     "Russ!"

     He paused but didn't turn to face me. I hurried to catch up with him and grabbed his wrist. He turned to me as if half asleep. The confused smile was still on his face.

     I squeezed his wrist. "Where are you going, man?"

     "Robbie?" He blinked. "Hey, I want to introduce you to somebody."

     "There's no one there, Russ. It's a trick."

     "Are you nuts? She's standing right there. Look!"

     I did, and she wasn't. I told him so. Then I told him about my grandpa.

     "Robbie," my grandfather interrupted, as if on cue. "Hurry up now. Enough of this foolishness."

     "Shut the fuck up," I shouted.

     "Who are you hollering at?" Russ seemed puzzled.

     "My grandpa. You didn't hear him, right? And I bet that you can't see him either, can you?"

     Russ nodded, frowning. He glanced into the darkness and then back at me.

     "And I can't see or hear whatever it is you see out there," I explained. "They're not real, Russ. We're hallucinating. It's like a bad acid trip."

     "It's not…not real?"

     "No. It's just the darkness. Something in the darkness is fucking with our heads, man."

     "She's not there."

     It wasn't a question, but I shook my head anyway.

It's a harrowing moment so early in the novel. As readers we are still orienting ourselves to these characters, and we are relieved that Keene is not going to use his main protagonists as canon fodder; he saves that privilege for a couple of firemen in a 4x4 heading for the next town over.

❖

Darkness on the Edge of Town gives us at least a dozen main characters: the mad, the bad, and the dangerous, most turning out to be dangerous to Robbie, Russ, and Christy.

After initial toing and froing in the first half of the novel, Keene gives us some very funny social interactions as Robbie, Russ and their neighbor Cranston try to form a group to probe into the darkness.

     There were five teenage boys hanging around the burn barrel on our street corner. Even though it was daytime, smoke and shadows obscured their faces until I got closer. One of them was occupied with a handheld video game system that still had power, and his attention was totally focused on that. But the rest of them looked up as Russ, Cranston, and I approached. One of them, a white kid whose baggy jeans hung low enough to expose three-quarters of his boxer shorts, stepped forward.

     "'Sup, dog? What you need?"

     I tried to hide my smirk. I had nothing against the dude's fashion sense or slang or intentional grammar-mangling. I've had plenty of friends who did the same thing. But two things were immediately obvious to me. One, if I wanted these guys to help us, I'd have to convince this de facto leader, and two, their leader was an idiot.

     "What's up," I returned the greeting. "You alright?"

     "We solid, yo. Just chilling. Know what I'm saying? Got to wonder who these three dudes are, steppin' to us on our corner, though."

     "Sorry for intruding."

     "So what you want? You here to break bad? Know what I'm saying?"

     "Not really," Russ said. "You sound like you're auditioning for The Wire or something."

     The leader scowled. "What you mean?"

     "I mean that I don't understand a goddamned thing you just said. What language are you speaking?"

     "The fuck you been smoking, old man? You looking to get your ass stomped?"

     I interrupted, before Russ could reply. "We need some help. I asked around and heard that you and your crew are some good people to have guarding your back."

     He grinned. "Word. People sayin' that for real? It's true. Our set rules this motherfuckin' street. Don't nothing go on without us knowing about it. Know what I'm saying?"

     I thought about pointing out that before the darkness came, the only place he and his friends ruled was maybe the high school—and even that was doubtful. I swallowed my laughter and tried to appear impressed.

     "I'm Robbie. This is Russ and Mr. Cranston."

     "'Sup." He nodded at Russ and Cranston, then motioned to his buddies. "I'm T. This is Irish, Stan the Man, Mad Mike, and Mario."

     All of them mumbled greetings, except Mario, who didn't look up from his game. T slapped the back of his head, and he almost dropped the unit.

     "Where your manners, dog? Say hello, motherfucker. Be polite and shit."

     "Yo, Tucker! You gonna make me blow this level! Been trying to get this shit for two days."

     "Fuck that game. And how many times I got to tell you? Out here on the street, you call me T. You feel me? Do I call you Phil? No, I call you Mario, motherfucker. So don't be calling me Tucker anymore. Tucker is dead. Know what I'm saying? Tucker was my slave name."

     Russ cleared his throat. "Slave name?"

     "Damn straight."

     Cranston seemed bewildered. "But…you're white."

     "Shit." T snickered. "You think I don't know that, yo? Hell yeah, I'm white."

     "Don't you think that calling yourself a slave might be disrespectful to those who are actually descended from slaves, man?"

     "See, you thinking in terms of color, old hippie dude. We need to move beyond that."

     "But you're talking about slavery," Cranston persisted. "You're making light of one of the most horrendous things ever perpetrated by mankind."

     "Slavery don't know no color, yo. And I ain't making light of it either. I was a slave to my parents and shit. A slave to my motherfucking school. A slave to all their fucked up rules. Know what I'm saying? But my parents ain't come home from work, and school's out forever, so now I'm free. I ain't a slave no more."

     Cranston opened his mouth to respond, but then he shut it again and simply stared at the teen. He looked bewildered. Russ looked annoyed. I thought it was funny, myself.

     T turned to Mario. "We got visitors. Say hello, stupid. Don't be a dick."

     "'Sup." Mario, aka Phil, turned back to his game.

     "We need your help," I repeated. "You interested?"

     "Yo, we for hire, if the price is right. Know what I'm saying? What you need done? And, more importantly, what you paying?"

     "All in good time. First, I need to round up a few more people."

     "For what?"

     "You'll see."

❖

The probe into the darkness by Robbie's band of volunteers ends in a deadly fiasco. Lives are lost and Robbie takes the blame. This sets the novel's denouement in motion: as supplies dwindle and the darkness itself accelerates every argument among individuals to the point of homicide, Robbie, Russ, and Christy decide on one last strategy that may permit escape.

The fact that the rest of the world may no longer be there only underscores the weight of this choice.

Near the end of Walden, Thoreau noted, "No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well."

The modest truth of fiction in Darkness on the Edge of Town wears very well indeed.

Jay

28 August 2021

It’s a prelude: "Take the Long Way Home" by Brian Keene (Deadite Press, 2006)

....They were looting the Wal-Mart as I walked past. Surprisingly, the whole thing seemed pretty civil. Locals, people I knew and faces I recognized, filed out of the store carrying everything from food to televisions. They pushed shopping carts filled to overflowing with goods. There was no fighting or shoving. It was eerily calm. Neighbors greeted each other, and helped each other load up their cars and trucks. I heard laughter, saw lovers holding hands, children smiling. The scene was polite and friendly, almost festive. A carnival atmosphere where all that was missing was a Ferris wheel and a few cotton candy vendors. Maybe a trained elephant doing tricks for the kids, as well.

❖

Take the Long Way Home by Brian Keene (Deadite Press, 2006)

In the afterword to this novella, author Brian Keene puts his bona fides on the table:

I was raised by two Irish-American Protestant parents, attended a Methodist church, and was even the president of the church youth group at one point, if you can dig that. My grandparents were Presbyterians, my extended family hardcore Southern Baptists, and I once dated a preacher's daughter. My point is; I was surrounded by religion, specifically Christianity, all through my childhood and teenage years. Readers have commented that my fiction seems to be primarily based on the Christian mythos—well, that's why. 

    Readers have also said that they see a deep schism; that I often depict God as the ultimate bad guy, and I think that's also a fair assumption. I trace that to adulthood. As a young man, I traveled the world and was exposed to many other religions and alternative ways of thinking. I came to realize that what I was brought up to believe wasn't the whole truth, the big picture, and that there were millions of other people whose ideas and faiths were just as valid and deep and personal.

    I've gone through phases: occultism, powwow, paganism, Buddhism, atheism, and finally, agnosticism. At forty-three, I'm no longer sure what I believe, and that bothers me more and more each day. I believe in an afterlife, but I'm not sure that it's Heaven. I believe that there's something more to this world, to this universe, something behind the veil, but I'm not sure that it's God. 

    Sometimes, it seems like the more I learn, the less I know.

"Take the Long Way Home" is not satire or black comedy or send-up. Keene presents The Rapture as a real event: a trumpet blast is heard around the world, then millions immediately vanish. Good people and not-so-good people remain and must contend. Mistakes, errors in judgment, violence, and carnage ensue. 

Keene lets the reader infer the widescreen epic character of the catastrophe, but carefully only follows his own trio of protagonists, on foot, as they walk their daily commuter route home from suburban Baltimore to small-town southern Pennsylvania. 

In the Maryland portions of the story, maddened crowds wreak havoc, pertetrate mob violence, and inflict vigilante death. Keene does not push a gloating we're-the-real-monsters line indulged in by many contemporary visceral horror writers. He suggests it, certainly, but is careful to counterpoint such moments with expressions of longing, ambivalence, regret, and existential dysphoria sparked by the crisis.

Late at night, narrator Steve Leiberman finally gets a ride from a minister who is driving to Harrisburg. As the physical agonies of hours of walking, escaping, evading, and facing a variety of mortal perils abates, Steve observes:

     "We'll survive," I said. "We'll pick up the pieces, dust ourselves off and move on. We always do. Look at everything the human race has been through. We always bounce back."

    He shook his head. "Not this time. The next seven years will quite literally be hell on earth. War. Famine. Earthquakes. Disease. Total chaos."

    "Don't we have that now?"

    "No, Steve. This is just the beginning. We have those things now, but they pale in comparison to what's coming. This will be a tough time for the tribulation saints."

    I gasped.

    "What's wrong?" he asked.

    "I—something you said just made me think. I heard something similar earlier today."

    "How so?"

    I told him about all that had transpired. Even with the disappearances, I didn't expect him to believe me when I got to Gabriel and the skinheads turning into salt. But when I'd finished, he simply nodded his head.

    "You've been chosen."

    I snorted, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. "Chosen for what?"

    "Don't scoff. A dynamic new leader is about to arise. People will see him as a great man. He will fix everything, stop the lawlessness and chaos and usher in an era of peace."

    "But you said it would be Hell on earth. Wars and famine and all that."

    "It's a false peace, and he's anything but a great man. The Bible calls this man Antichrist. He's a descendent of those who destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. But who he really is, is Satan. The Antichrist will enjoy worldwide popularity. People will love him like no other world leader they've ever known."

    "Who is he?"

    "I don't know. He has yet to reveal himself. But I'm sure he's already active. We've probably watched him in action for years, and loved him without knowing his true identity. Soon, most likely within a few weeks, he will set up a new one-world government in response to today's events. He'll even bring peace to Israel with the signing of a seven-year agreement."

    "Never happen," I said. "There will never be peace in Israel, especially now. And what does this have to do with me anyway? You said I was chosen."

    "The signing of the agreement kicks off a seven-year period called the tribulation, and those who receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior after the Rapture are called tribulation saints. Many of them will be Jews, just like you. Revelation talks about the 144,000 Jewish witnesses. These witnesses, the tribulation saints, will be protected supernaturally from the horrors to come. Much like you were today, with your guardian. What did you say his name was?"

    "Gabriel," I whispered. He'd mentioned something about the 144,000 as well, when Al the skinhead held me at knifepoint.

    "Gabriel the Protector. You do know Gabriel was an angel of the Lord?"

    "No," I said. "But I do now."

    

Brian Keene is clearly passionate about exploring the end of the world in his fiction. "Take the Long Way Home" is a powerful story, curious and alive to the contradictions at war in its world. As in the only other Keene book I have read, The Conqueror Worms (Leisure, 2006), there is nothing of the "relentlessly trashy" method S. T. Joshi condemns in his piece on the author in 21st-Century Horror: Weird Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium (Sarnath Press, 2018).

Like Keene, I am passionate about end-of-the-world literature, past and present. "Take the Long Way Home" is smaller in scope than works like King's "The Mist" or Koontz's The Taking, but it is no less serious for all that.

Jay

24 August 2021