Review: foil an alien invasion in 200 pages
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 4, 2014
On the outskirts of sleepy Ault, Colorado, three high school friends - Jack, Scott, and Melanie - are out for a bit of smoke and drink when they witness a meteor plummeting into a farmer's field. Approaching the smoking crater, the kids are exposed to a weird blue mist. And yay for that. The three teens soon collapse into a fitful coma and wake up days later with strange abilities... just in time for the military to show up and look at them sideways. Just in time, maybe, to thwart an alien invasion.You can finish Adam Moon's APEX in one sitting, it's that short of a read. Moon pretty much dispenses with character development (I, for one, think the paranoid Army General's character arc could've been more deftly handled). It's a propulsive, action-driven story. Moon straight away plants the reader in the thick of things. Jack is the prohibitive main character, but, really, it seems to me that he and Scott are pretty interchangeable. Maybe Jack is more responsible. He's certainly the most powerful of the five who got sprayed with that blue aerosol (oh, yeah, a surly farmer and his wife also got sprayed). But strip away the kids' power sets and I'm thinking they just fade into the background.Several chapters unfold from the perspectives of the alien baddies (called the Greys). Basically, they're a hostile armada tasked by its home world with establishing a series of colony planets. And if that meant eradicating the intelligent life forms already on these planets, well, let's just call that a bonus. I do like that the writer portrays the head of the armada as an incompetent figure whom the alien high command had deployed because even he couldn't possibly foul up this cakewalk of a mission. What there is in the way of comic relief (not much), this inadequate commander provides.Even though it's such a short read, Adam Moon stages events on an epic scale. Moon seems at his best when he's writing the bombastic superhero vs. UFO combat sequences. Can our three teenagers - and that surly farmer and his wife and the gun-toting residents of Ault, Colorado - safeguard the world from a conquering alien species that has yet to fail? It might be worth your time to find out.