Status Updates From The Darkest of Nights (Brit...

If ever a book flipped a switch - at about the halfway point, to boot - to go from somewhat boring to incredibly thrilling, this is that book. I think the ‘calm before the storm’ half should have been better…but I’m shocked and captivated now.

During the COVID years, I didn’t totally avoid novels depicting pandemics, but this one didn’t get on my radar. I read Pandemic, by James Barrington in July 2020, which I figured, as a James Bond type scenario, would have a happy ending to a rather far-fetched plot. I read The Scarlet Plague by Jack London in 2021, which I loved, and which jumped to the post-apocalypse. THIS novel might have been too ‘real’, then.

I’m curious about this author.

[….] My God, he realised suddenly—they’ve finally beaten me! By they he meant the world at large and men in general, not just the insurgents. Somehow he had always managed to pull the right strings at the right time in order to arrange the pattern of his fate, but now they had taken over and they were going to pull the strings. For perhaps the first time he was depressed by a sense of utter defeat.

“Well, the leadership seems to be emerging and the violence is being systematised. They’ve acquired weapons and they’re ruthless enough to be dangerous.”

Grimly realistic. What to do with those immune to the deadly virus? Recruit them to an anti-labor malitia to break strikes by workers not given a berth in underground shelters.

"[….]With my usual proverbial luck I managed to find out from a drunken and indiscreet civil servant that the Ministry of Works has put out secret tenders for the construction of more than two thousand deep underground shelters and a like number of big incinerators all over the country. They’re to be built on a crash priority basis during the next few weeks.”

“Incinerators?” she queried.