Review: Nice premise weighed down by simplistic characters and bad grammar
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 20, 2013
EMP is trending as a plot device for indie authors to write about the end of civilization. This author starts Into the Darkness with a foreword chock full of scientific premise and cites...and then devolves into a wooden story with characters that garner no sympathy and no emotion.The main theme is about a solar flare that creates an EMP massive enough to fry all microelectronics, presumably across the planet (since throughout the book there is no mention of other countries coming to the aid of the US; I've found that most indie authors in this genre assume that no one will ever help us if/when the SHTF).Like other indies, the author writes as if civilization is literally hanging by the thinnest of threads thanks to the wonders of cell phones and GPS, and that all people need is for the power to go out for more than a few minutes in order to start wantonly killing people and raping women. The first kill in the book actually occurs by the hero, approximately two hours after the lights go out. Wow. I always wonder just how cynical the prepper/survivalist clique is.The plot then proceeds as all these books seem to proceed - hero on the quest to reunite with his family, has adventures on the way, gets into and out of jams. There is a smidgen of Survivorman strewn throughout the chapters - we learn how to make a bow, how to fish, etc. - but these tidbits seem almost an afterthought and there is no real linkage or cohesion in the overall story.Another example: The hero and his band come across a group of stranded Boy Scouts and have to save them. I mean, come on - they're Boy Scouts! Did none of them actually learn anything from their merit badges? The author writes them as helpless as everyone else in the book - except our heroes, of course; they're flawless and full of answers, which makes them eminently boring.On top of the simplistic storyline - almost cartoonish in the writing of dialogue of the "bad guys" - there is the worst example of tense-shifting I've ever seen among the thousands of books I've read in my lifetime. The author has no clear sense of present, past, present perfect and past perfect tenses. He simply intermingles them from paragraph to paragraph, and often from phrase to phrase within a sentence. Ew. It's a sign of our times: Too many indie writers simply have no basic writing skills, but if they can get some mess that contains EMP or end-of-the-world or survivalist or prepper schemes out as a Kindle title, there are always a few hundred people who will snap it up.Me included, of course; but having slogged through this title, I can at least provide a review that warns others. The author awkwardly sets up a sequel for this book, but I'll pass. He simply didn't write well enough to motivate me to want to know what happens next.