Book Review: Apocalypticon
Apocalypticon. Clayton Smith. Dapper Press, January 19, 2014, Trade Paperback and Kindle e-book, 338 pages.
Reviewed by Stephanie Wilson Medlock.
Clayton Smith has written a wacky novel about the end of the world. Imagine Cormac McCarthy’s The Road mixed with the Three Stooges. In tone, the novel is a graphic novel without the graphics. People are killed on virtually every page, with exceedingly detailed splats and thumps, but we are not allowed to mourn for them, because in this fast-paced buddy epic, new threats, attacks, and even killer zombies are just around the corner.
Smith begins his novel in the smoking remains of Chicago, three years after “monkey bombs” have decimated 99 percent of the inhabitants of the United States. Ben and Patrick, two friends from St. Louis who have been holed up in a high-rise apartment on Lake Shore Drive since the end of life as they knew it, decide to take a last road trip, which they acknowledge is probably a suicide mission.
Their destination: Disney World. The reason? Smith waits until the last page to reveal this information, although most readers will have figured it out at least a hundred pages earlier.
What Smith does extremely well is describe the physical realities of life after both bombs and poison gas have killed off nearly everyone and reduced society to small groupings of feudal gangs. The beautiful city of Chicago is largely rubble, and what infrastructure still stands is in constant danger of being blown up to allow one group or another to control sections of the city. Because the novel is set three years after the end of modern life, not one hundred years (as in the teen novel Divergent), the survivors still cling to the identities they had before all work became meaningless—securities traders still live together in the ruins of the Mercantile Exchange, worshiping money, when money has no value, and the man who runs Amtrak (without much real cargo and almost no passengers) is obsessed with maintaining the trains’ schedules.
Smith describes a world without government, without the Internet or even the telephone, without newspapers, without fresh food, without medical care, without any sort of grass roots organization attempting to pull people together and rebuild. In this dystopia, most people have lost any sense of humanity, and have either gone mad or decided to use the lack of any restraining law enforcement to amass what remains of the world’s desirable goods—in this case, booze and canned food.
Ben and Patrick use subterfuge and their cache of weapons to foil the attempts on their lives that occur without any clear motivation but with frightening regularity. Both are mauled and beaten, often by each other in their inept attempts to dispatch the bad guys and continue their journey. Their injuries are described in whimsical terms and each man pops up after nearly being killed with Batman-like aplomb.
What is lacking in this book, besides characters that are more than one-dimensional, is any sense of context: why, for example, did the attacks on the United States take place, and is this destruction worldwide? Smith starts off with apparent naturalism, but soon serves up roving religious groups who crucify any survivors unlucky enough to meet them, followed by bands of once humans who have morphed into iron-limbed zombies desperate to eat human flesh.
The irony is that Smith can definitely write. His dialogue is snappy, his powers of description are terrific, and he has plenty of imagination. But his attempts to make the end of the world funny or even ironic do not succeed. Reading the book is an exhausting experience that will please a limited number of young adult male readers.