The Wombat's Book Blog

So apparently this is one of the best apocalyptic novels ever, at least according to large swathes of the Interwebs.

Personally, I don't see it. The plot is interesting and the research is excellent, but the writing itself is execrable. I have expectations of professional novelists. These include being able to remember what the beginning of a sentence was by the time you get to the end - if you start a sentence with 'after' I expect that sentence to have something happening after something else.

The characters are flat and uninteresting and I found myself not caring about their plight in the slightest.

Also, he nicked a number of plot points - not vital ones, but several of the surrounding atmospheric details, like who became president after Air Force 1 went down and so on, from Alas, Babylon.