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Jun 03, 2018richmole rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
NOTE: NO SPOILERS, HERE! I was encouraged to grab this book after reading promotional praise by two excellent authors: Stephen King (no more needs to be said) and Ralph Peters, whose five major American Civil War novels are the best of the genre. More germane, the high quality of former US Army officer Peters' analytical political/military NON-fiction. 20 pages in, I wondered how King and Peters got it so wrong. Then I told myself, "Get past the style," and kept reading. Then I remembered: King and Peters NEVER mentioned style. What impressed them (and yeah, me, too) was the intriguing multi-layered plot, the feasibility of this nuclear armageddon novel. If you're a young war-and-military-minded male between 16 and 30 years of age, you represent the author's target market. You'll probably like it, maybe a lot. And the over-the-top style may not bother you at all. All others: be forewarned. You will read the kind of overly-detailed descriptions that reflect the obsessions of that target market. One example: "A 25mm Bushmaster chain gun," Gnereal Hagberg said. "Each bullet is an inch in diameter--twice the size of the Pakistani gun--and fire almost three and a half rounds per second. It chambers those rounds via a high speed electric motor with a roller chain driving the bolt back and forth. It can kill anything two miles away and more." Please note: the above is NOT descriptive passage. This is DIALOGUE. Who the hell talks like this?? Answer: nobody. But it doesn't matter here. In this respect, the novel resembles lesser works such as Patriots, by John Welsey, Rawles (the comma is, for some reason, intentional.). That's too bad. But not for the publisher or author, who really understand the target market. More evidence: dig the photo of the author on the back flap. Hilarious! Something out of National Lampoon or Monty Python. Anyway... Author Robert Gleason is guilty of the same literary overkill in other areas, too. Take clothing: "President George Caldwell was deck out in a blue pin-striped Armani, CIA Director William Conrad favored a tan Dior Homme; and NSA Directyor Charles Carmony entered in what appeared to be a five-figure bespoke silk suit, custom tailored on Savile Row. A gold, diamond-studded Bulgaria glittered on Carmony's wrist." And blahblahblah. Anyway, you might want to do what I did: speed-read, scan pages, skip ahead. Get the gist in half the time it otherwise might take you to read this tale page-by-age. I appreciate the research it took to inspire the plot ("Inspire," because the research was first undertake to write a NON-FICTION book, duly published.) To read more about this, and the background of the author, read Gleason's Afterward FIRST. It's Fascinating--and also instructive: you, too, can write a book like this! Good for Gleason: he got great mileage out of YEARS of painstaking work. Too bad it wasn't as good for more readers.