Book review: Wastelands 2

Wastelands 2 - More Stories of the ApocalypseWastelands 2 – More Stories of the Apocalypse by John Joseph Adams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A second volume in a themed horror collection might seem like a good candidate for more experimental work that may not be entirely successful and such is the case with Wastelands 2, although I enjoyed the majority of the stories.

Post-apocalypse tales are one of the enduring favorites in horror fiction. Some of the classic boogeymen like nuclear war have faded as threats to all humanity while others like global warming have risen–Wastelands 2 delivers on both of these, along with biological terrors, Lovecraftian beasts from the sea, really mean flowers and, of course, Kevin Costner. Sort of.

While the stories are bound by the theme of apocalypse, style and tone is all over the place. There is little in the way of humor (as one might expect), though Keffy R. M. Kehrli’s “Advertising at the End of the World” with its androids-as-literal-walking-advertisements still searching for buyers after a super-virus decimates humanity, is quietly absurd. Most are dark or darker and the majority betray little hope regarding humankind’s ability to come back from the brink of extinction. You’ll also put down the book thinking most people are jerks.

This is not exactly feel-good material is what I’m saying.

A few standouts for me include Jack McDevitt’s “Ellie,” which presents a nice twist on a story about caretakers keeping things running at a massive particle collider in the hope of staving off further disaster. The aforementioned “Advertising at the End of the World” is a relatively original take on post-apocalypse, with the sensible protagonist Marie trying to deal with an army of annoying androids as humanely as possible. George R. R. Martin’s hippie-fest “…For a Single Yesterday” reminded me a bit of the novel Station Eleven, with entertainers providing a focal point in surviving communities, with a bit of time-travelly drugs tossed in.

“Monstro” is a deliciously weird story about a virus inducing strange and dangerous groupthink among the infected quarantined in Haiti. Author Junot Díaz steeps the story in local culture while slowly unwinding an ever-widening apocalypse that may or may not be contained on the island state.

Jake Kerr’s “Biological Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince” is an epistemological accounting of how an author survives, writes about and in a way is consumed by a meteor impact that devastates North America in the first half of the 21st century. I feel this format–excerpts from Wikipedia, interviews, news reports and so on–is trickier to pull off than it looks but Kerr handles it expertly, lending an authentic feel to these glimpses of Prince’s life and the apocalyptic event that sits at its core.

On the negative side, I found David Brin’s “The Postman” (a novella version of the novel) was fine but oddly undercuts the whole enterprise on the very last page with the protagonist turning weirdly flippant and derisive. I have no idea if the book (or the Costner movie) are the same, but I found it jarring.

But while “The Postman” was still a pleasant enough read overall, I only managed a few pages of Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Traditional.” The story features an unlikable and uninteresting protagonist and is written in the second person: “You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere.” I’ve always been the kind of person who finds the second person point of view a very tough sell. I was not sold. I didn’t even rent.

There are more than enough stories in Wastelands 2, however, to recommend it to anyone looking for some post-apocalyptic fun.

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