I can’t remember what got me to read this book…
One Second After begins one second after it was too late to prepare for an existential threat to the United States. Unlike the usual zombie pandemics, this dystopia is brought on by an event grounded in science that has been debated in the upper echlons of the US government. That alone lends a different kind of fear, as the premise is very near reality. That premise made this a page turner, regardless of the underlying faults in Forstchen’s writing.
First off : his characters are flat. There is no arc to anyone. How they began is how they end. The only person of any semi-depth is the main character and he could be summed as: borderline alcoholic, ex-military, father, widower… “stoic?” That’s about it.
If you read On Writing by Stephen King, which, in turn, borrows from The Elements of Style, Fortschen uses wayyyy to many *ly words in his writing! … and I swear, I’m done with the phrase “spoke softly” (IT’S CALLED “WHISPERING!”). He tells rather than shows. There was this pivotal scene he had built up to, and then, rather than take us through it in realtime, he tells it in the past tense! All the tension is gone. Throughout, he uses “should of” instead of “should have”… where was the editor?
Regardless, Forstchen did get me thinking about how fragile our day-to-day is; that is horrifying, not fantasy, very very near.