I mentioned a Mike Sheridan eBook I'd read and enjoyed last year, Winter's Edge. Winter's Edge is a post-apocalyptic novel set deep into the post-apocalypse. This week I finished reading another Mike Sheridan eBook, No Direction Home, and I'm happy to report that I enjoyed this story every bit as much as Winter's Edge, and probably even more because it wasn't set in a fictional, no matter how likely or real-feeling, future, but the scary-enough present.

The characters are fairly well-developed, the prose flows well, and the editor did a good job. There were a few clumsy passages here and there, but it is, overall, a well-written book - something that's pretty hit-and-miss with many eBooks I've read.

There's another semi-apocalyptic eBook story, Race Wars by DW Ulsterman that I mentioned a while back which is similar in many ways to No Direction Home, but the underlying premise for the horrific events in each story is completely different so don't be dissuaded from reading No Direction Home if you've read Race Wars (which is an on-going story that I've lost some interest in because of its odd a-few-chapters-at-a-time release schedule). Premise-wise, this story is also very similar to The Last ship TV series, though No Direction Home is told from the perspective of civilian survivors, not those in the military who are relatively safely isolated from the diseased population centers.

No Direction Home follows several groups of people (this is the primary similarity to Race Wars), ranging from wide-eyed and innocent to vicious and horrible, as they deal with an Ebola-on-steroids illness labelled "vPox" that wipes out most of the population of the United States. We're left unsure of just how badly the rest of the world has been affected by the quickly-spreading illness, though a few of the characters are European visitors to the U.S. (Jonah, probably my favorite character, seems a more authentic version of my mental image of Mad Sweeney than we're getting in the American Gods adaptations). Our protagonists are a handful of the tiny percentage of immune people in the population who are not affected by the illness. Similar to The Walking Dead and One Second After (mentioned briefly last year), the events in this story take place in the southern U.S./southeast U.S. states. No Direction Home is very much like the later seasons of The Walking Dead, where zombies have almost become an afterthought and it's just survivor on survivor crime in a world full of stuff, ripe for the taking (another common theme in The Walking Dead). We see the best and the worst in people who find themselves in a world without rules or any grown-ups who will tell them no.

Here's a passage with my favorite character not long after the world falls apart...

Jonah and Colleen walked north up Kirkman Road. They were on their way back to the Sun Ray after spending the past hour in the Publix supermarket. Each wheeled a large trolley in front of them, laden with the provisions they would need for their journey. Many of the stores they passed had been looted, though most still looked to have plenty of stock left inside. It indicated to Jonah just how few survivors there must be. Earlier, he'd glimpsed a few of them scurrying across the deserted streets. Most appeared to be on their own, a few in pairs. Some wore surgical masks, who Colleen surmised mightn't be immune to the disease but rather had barricaded themselves in their homes to avoid it.

On the way to the supermarket, however, he'd spotted a group of four men that had turned down a side street and disappeared from view. Something about the way they'd strutted down the middle of the road made him wary. Jonah could recognize a skanger a mile away, and he was thankful that, with their backs to him and Colleen, they hadn't spotted the couple. Colleen was right. Tomorrow, their top priority would be to get to a gun shop and arm themselves. In the meantime, in his shopping cart was a baseball bat he'd grabbed from a sports store along the way. A Louisville Slugger, the label said. Sounded good to him.

"Another thing, love," he said, their trolleys rattling noisily down the street. "When we leave town, let's head north. I want to get someplace where I'm not sweating like a pig twenty-four hours a day. Agreed?"

Sadly, the story ends before much has happened beyond bringing all the divergent groups together into a common location in Tennessee. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Eastwood (which we are treated to a brief taste of at the end of No Direction Home). There's also a excised chapter available for free from the author, which provides background on vPox - along with another post-apocalyptic novel, Outzone Raider - which I haven't read (the excised chapter or Outzone Raider).

Warning: There is a fair bit of profanity in this book - the thugs communicate as thugs do - and a light dusting of sexual content, though nothing graphic. This isn't really a book for children, though I'm sure teens with an interest in post-apocalyptic survival would enjoy it.



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