AFTER

In Starling’s post-apocalyptic novel with SF elements, a nameless messenger carries communications between survivor settlements in a dangerous American West.

It’s been 11 years since clawed, flesh-eating, giant aliens attacked Earth, and their ever-present flying disks continue to patrol the planet. Electronic technology and communications were wiped out by electromagnetic pulses, and billions died. Now the air and water are tainted, and humans in “converter” breathing masks subsist in scattered fortifications or exist independently as bandits and loners. The nameless hero (who, readers eventually learn, is ex-military) traverses ruins of the western United States as a self-appointed messenger, carrying notes from desperate holdovers from one redoubt to another. In self-imposed exile, she’s tortured by grief over the loss of her fighter-pilot husband and their children; she also faces survivors who embrace lawlessness, nihilism, or cannibalistic cultism. Starling’s compact work reads like a splatterpunk version of Cormac McCarthy’s grim novel The Road (2006), combined with the second half of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898); like the Martians in the latter work, the extraterrestrials in this one howl continuously, and like Wells’ narrator, Starling’s protagonist is nameless and navigates a psychological and physical landscape of devastation. Scattered supporting characters have disturbing, unhelpful ways of dealing with humankind’s fall. A sickening cyborg called “the Crone” even manages to raise a barbaric army that’s as inhumane as the alien invaders: “What seemed like hundreds of them followed over every angle of the rim, crazed and swarming warriors carving through the darkness and staining the black night red. Some wore exotic military uniforms, gaudy jackets flared with ribbons of superfluous rank and trophies of the slain.” The details of the invasion itself are left for readers to supply, which effectively puts the emphasis squarely on the immediate mood. Along the way, the author gets across a sense of fear of what lies around every corner, and reveals the visible and invisible scars of the traumatized.

Somewhat familiar but unsentimental speculative fiction that’s wire-taut and emotionally rich.