Review: Fun, Albeit Illogical, Romp Through a Near-Future Dystopia
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 2, 2014
Homeless reminded me in a lot of ways of the first season of The Walking Dead. It was fast-paced; all of my attention was focused on, "What's next? What's next?" On the positive side, this made Homeless a fun, quick read. On the less positive side, it made it easy to overlook plot holes and inconsistencies which, after I finished reading the book, really bothered me.The essential premise of Homeless seems to be that people have lost their homes because those homes have been infested by "something"; the "something" is not explained, and the few descriptions of it seem to be contradictory. Apparently, the "something" spontaneously appears in places which have remained absent of sunlight for too long: not only houses, but also car trunks and even forests and other heavily shadowed places:"Still keeping your goods in the trunk?" he asks."Safest place," I tell him."Funny choice of words.""So long as I open it up once a day, nothing grows in there."Humans now use tents for shelter, but, as would be expected given the synopsis thus far, even the tents have to be taken down each day and put back up at night so that they, too, do not become infested. Mitch, the main character, is walking in the "night air" when he has this conversation with an old man trying to raise his tent:[I]t isn't safe inside, no matter how bright it is outside. . . . [Y]ou have to take down the tents, every day, or they get infected, too. And the cars, too, unless you got a moon roof."So far, so good. However, the bulk of the book is then spent with the protagonist trying to save a colony of survivors, whose home is described like this:It's dotted with more than a dozen pentagonal hub tents zipped together to form intricate snowflake patterns. The majority are from the same brand, lending the entire camp the look of a space colony.Given this description, it's hard to believe that all of the tents are taken down every day, and, in fact, nothing in the subsequent text suggests that these tents are ever taken down. And if car trunks can become infested if not opened to sunlight at least once a day, why aren't large storage boxes, such as those Mitch later finds filled with weapons, also infested after having been closed for months? More importantly, if a car trunk can become infested so rapidly, why aren't all of the tents infested every night?The dialogue is also hard to explain. The book suggests that civilization has reverted to that of the Old West (with postal "expressmen" on horseback substituting for the Pony Express); even so, why would everyone suddenly start to speak that way, too? It's not as though eons have passed and the characters in the book weren't alive, and educated, in the twenty-first century. Perhaps this was meant to evoke the hybrid language used on the TV series Firefly (which does seem to be a major influence, even to the extent that, as in that series, men at the top of the socio-economic ladder describe prostitution as "honest work"), but the passage of time explained the development of Firefly's speech.As I said initially, none of these issues prevented me from enjoying Homeless as I was reading it, and I might well read future books about Mitch's adventures if Wilson writes a series around him. However, I would not recommend this book to those who like their horror/science fiction/dystopia to make logical sense.I received a free copy of Homeless through Read It & Reap in exchange for an honest review.