five years after a john matherson novel william r forstchen

Unfortunately, Forstchen focused his story on exactly what I found the least interesting. His daughters act like they are straight out of a Nick at Nite show.įortunately, once the EMP went off, the book picked up a little bit. His wife has recently died and he cares for his two teenage daughters. John Matherson, our protagonist, is a retired colonel turned history professor at a small college in North Carolina. The author is a history professor at a small college in North Carolina and father to one daughter. The writing was painfully bad, and Forstchen took every opportunity to snidely push his political agenda while living out his own personal fantasy. Thirty pages in, I e-mailed one of my book club friends, despairing that I had another three hundred pages to go. It’s an interesting premise, and despite Newt Gingrich, I started the book optimistically. In one second and with no warning, the entire country is set back hundreds of years.

In this novel, the EMP disables anything with a computer chip, knocking out the electrical grid, radios, phones, and even most cars. The country is attacked by an EMP (electromagnetic pulse), which can occur when a nuclear weapon is set off a couple hundred miles above the ground. One Second After is a post-apocalyptic tale set primarily in the small town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. Eww, please don’t mix my fiction with politics, especially politicians I don’t particularly like. On the other hand, this book begins with a foreword by Newt Gingrich. On the one hand, this book is a bestseller, with 4.5 stars on Amazon and over five thousand reviews! That’s a good sign. My book club gets me to read a number of books I would have never read otherwise, and One Second After (2009) by William Forstchen is one of them.

Five years after a john matherson novel william r forstchen