Blog Tour (Review): The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Praise for THE APOCALYPSE SEVEN

“Doucette’s ’seven’ aren’t just ‘magnificent’—they’re also entertaining as hell.” —Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author of the Infected Trilogy

“The adventure I’ve been looking for! Never once did I know what to expect, and I loved being proved wrong at every turn. Far more mind-bending than a book this fun has any right to be.” —Zack Jordan, author of The Last Human

“[A] riveting postapocalyptic outing… Doucette’s vibrant prose and unique premise make for an enticing adventure.” —Publishers Weekly

“A cinematic, speculative exercise in which a ragtag band saves the world, kind of.” —Kirkus Reviews

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whatever.

The whateverpocalypse. That’s what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets.

Add freakish weather to the mix, swings of temperature that spawn tornadoes one minute and snowstorms the next, and it seems things can’t get much weirder. Yet even as a handful of new survivors appear—Paul, a preacher as quick with a gun as a Bible verse; Win, a young professional with a horse; Bethany, a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysics adjunct—life in Cambridge, Massachusetts gets stranger and stranger.

The self-styled Apocalypse Seven are tired of questions with no answers. Tired of being hunted by things seen and unseen. Now, armed with curiosity, desperation, a shotgun, and a bow, they become the hunters. And that’s when things truly get weird.

I received a copy of The Apocalypse Seven for an honest review. What follows is my opinion and mine alone. There was no compensation made for this review.

Right off the bat, from the moment Robbie woke up, I knew I was going to like this book. The setup is perfect, it reminds me of . . . I think the best way to describe it is like a scene in Twelve Monkeys. In that post-apocalyptic/time-travel science fiction thriller, we see what we assume is New York City. It is a frozen wasteland with wild animals running around. That is this book, to put it simply.

It’s like the author chose a selected few people and placed them in that Discovery channel or History channel show that talks about what would happen to the world if there were no people. Each character has a backstory you learn as time goes. I found them to have just enough of a personality trope that you could pick out what their strengths and weaknesses are probably going to be, but no one was a stereotype.

It is intriguing to see the progression of a mindset as the characters grapple with what is surrounding them and what may have happened. How could the world have changed so much overnight? Are they all from the same time period? What made them be the only ones here?

All of these questions continue through the book and only having read it would you get the answers. There is humor in the character dynamics that I could relate to, the way they have to work with one another is believable, and the world itself is enriching.

Doucette’s writing style is well done. Each of his characters has their own solid voice and their personal reactions to what has happened are great. From just reading their first introductions, you learn that Robbie seems to use humor as a coping mechanism for tough things, Carol is pragmatic and thinks about survival first, and Toure’ seems to think he knows what is going on despite knowing nothing. There are other viewpoints and other characters, each one you learn something about them and are left wondering how their personality will work in this situation.

Because that’s all they have: Themselves.

I highly recommend this book.