 | Offered a general's star if he will accept assignment to a NATO post in Europe, Colonel John Matherson resigns his commission to move with his wife, dying of cancer, and their two daughters to her Christian-college hometown in the back woods of North Carolina. Then, one day, the lights go out, and, more ominously, car ignitions and cell phones fail, every electronic device drops dead all in one instant.
One Second After is the gripping story of survival in America after an EMP attack cripples the US, a post-apocalyptic tale in the tradition of Lucifer's Hammer and Alas, Babylon. A threat known since the sixties, an Electro-magnetic Pulse attack can be made using just one small nuclear device set off high above the atmosphere. The high-voltage flux this generates will fry any non-hardened electronics within the line of sight. The damage would be virtually complete and all but irreversible. In the first minute alone more than half a million people would die as their planes fell paralyzed from the sky. They would, as the cliche goes, be the lucky ones.
Knowing that Forstchen has previously co-authored other novels with Newt Gingrich (which I haven't read) I didn't go into this book expecting great literature. And great literature it isn't. But who cares? The story is fluidly written, and the plot grips you. The work is both realistic in its portrayal of how people react to disaster and romantic in portraying heroic people who identify their values and then struggle to maintain them. I finished this book in two eager late-bedtime readings. My throat tightened with emotion a few times. Whatever its minor drawbacks, if a story chokes you up and you find it hard to put the book down it's a good read. And if it makes people think about a serious threat to the civilized world, all the better.
And this book does have its flaws. Bizarrely, all the characters say "could of" or "should of" instead of "could've" or "should've" as if their speech itself and not only their writing were spelled ungrammatically. There is also too much exposition compared to dramatization for the novel to be great literature. Forstchen often tells us what has happened after the fact rather than showing us as it happens. But it's obvious that the author has a point to make, and he chooses to do it without slowing down the suspenseful and compelling story. Frankly, I expect Forstchen would forgo the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature if he could make the issue of preventing an EMP attack just one tenth as fashionable as was dealing with Y2K in its day.
It makes an interesting experiment to read some of the four-star and some of the one-star reviews of this book at Amazon. You will note that the actual substance of the criticisms in those reviews is the same. The reason for the difference in rating will become clear when you note such comments from the one-star reviewers as "extreme right wing views." (If Forstchen is extreme right wing, then he makes McCain look like Mussolini.) You can also see the author speak on Book TV or stream the interview at its website, which I strongly recommend. And I recommend that you read this book without reservation.
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One Second After by William R. Forstchen
