Station Eleven

A “good”, but not great, disaster movie/apocalypse book.

After some random Killer Virus destroys human civilization, leaving only some stragglers living in the abandoned shells of McDonald's, we follow a traveling band of musicians/Shakespearean actors around the Toronto-Michigan area, and cross-cut back and forth between Before and After the bio-apocalypse. Okay, that sounds super trite - especially the traveling actors thing - but it's fine, and quite fun. Written in the style of Modern Airport Paperbacks, chapters are short (sometimes just dialogue snippets or a few paras), and things move quickly: it's all action, action, action, with little internal or external reflection (I do not know what color the leaves were). i.e. It's written with movie rights in mind. :)))

The ensemble cast of characters are all quite interesting, and I loved the description of the glorious graphic novel one of them was writing, and the core storyline was satisfying - because, HOT DAMN, I figured it out on page 20!!! I never figure out mysteries so soon!!!! But as soon as the Prophet was noted as being “familiar” to Kirsten, the protagonist, and he called his dog “Luli”, I was like, I KNOW EXACTLY WHO THAT IS! Ahh, such self-satisfaction. I also finished this book in one sitting - another thing that hasn't happened in a long time - so YES, it's a page-turner. But who doesn't perversely enjoy survivalist/apocalypse disaster movies?

Not HUGELY imaginative on the actual destruction stuff; for a more mind-bending, but still quite trashy, bio-pocalypse, I recommend the hot mess that is Blood Music.