Swan Song

Ugh. I really really wanted to like this book, but it was a SLOG to get through. After being catapulted through a fantastic first third-ish, I tried to ride that momentum to the end, but it petered out hard.

Three things ruined this book for me more than anything else.

First off, the writing style/length. Holy shit this dude is verbose in the most useless way possible. It was padded out like a bad highschool essay. At least a third of this novel should have been left on the cutting room floor.

If you're going to describe literally every place and room and character down to the shoes on their feet and the texture of the floor, at least do some fucking environmental storytelling with it.

You don't need to tell me about every single character's red/brown/black coat/jacket/sweater with holes/dirt/tears. Tell me what they do differently. How they're surviving. Tell me about the orphan trying to hide two golden rings on a chain under his shirt. Tell me about the old man with prison tattoo style tally marks on his face. Tell me about anything that could be remotely interesting about these people that I can care about.

Same with the corpses that are literally everywhere and used as lazy grimdark set dressing. Just telling me there're bodies everywhere gets repetitive and boring real fast. Give me something interesting to grab onto. Show me a family in a bedroom and empty pill bottles. Show me cars at the bottom of ravines. Show me remains that tell me something about these people in their final moments, protection/betrayal/love/fear/regret/ANYTHING. Instead it's just spooky skeletons everywhere, no humans anywhere.

Also UGH sometime after around the halfway point, the prose slips into this weird hokey colloquial corny ass country voice for the rest of the book?

Secondly, and this one is kinda nitpicky, but there's a shitload of fridge logic in this book. Fridge logic works in a two hour movie because I don't really have time to do the math on how much food you'd need to find to feed an army of thousands for seven years in a post apocalyptic scavenger society. But in a thousand page book?? I'm constantly taken out of it by the absolute nonsensical shit that is just glossed over. No one's refining gas, but they have barrels and barrels of usable gasoline after seven years? It's raining and muddy all the time but somehow people are still finding cardboard boxes to sleep in?

Even worse, we're introduced to a group of orphans after the seven year time skip, who have been living alone for the most part the entire time. They're all 10-17ish, so they were 3-10ish when the bombs dropped. They all speak better English, and besides the fact that they're kinda dirty, are way smarter and more civilized than I was at that age. You'd expect some kind of unique culture to emerge right? Some unique traditions or slang or behaviors/fears/traumas? Nah. McCammon is more interested in telling you that the cave walls are slightly damp and shiny and that the room is warm and smells like stale gunpowder and farts.

Finally, I REALLY wish someone would have told me that this novel is basically Christian prosperity doctrine fanfiction. The core philosophy of this book is repulsive and implies some shitty beliefs.

The Good characters are all born Good. Goodness is an intrinsic quality and Good characters are surrounded by Good people, they do Good things and Good things happen to them. They don't have to make any difficult decisions because the Right path is always clear. There's always a heroic option for them to take and they take it without any second thoughts because they were divinely chosen and have magic powers and this is their destiny and they are Good and Righteous and blah blah blah

The Evil characters are all intrinsically Evil, etc etc etc.

No fucking nuance, no depth, no challenge, no growth. People are what they were born to be and nothing else.

It's a survivalist wasteland, but only the evil characters have to make any difficult choices. Why do they have to compromise their morals to survive? Because they were born evil and deserve to be punished, obviously.

I have more to say, but this is getting way too long and I think I might be ranting at this point.

First third of this book, up to the bombs dropping? 5/5. Everything up to the timeskip? ~3.5/5. Everything after? 1/5 at best.