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A review by lesserjoke
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse by John Joseph Adams
3.0
This 2008 anthology collects 22 short stories about life after various apocalyptic scenarios, all but one of which had been previously published elsewhere (although Stephen King's plague journal "The End of the Whole Mess" was the only entry I'd read before). The sole new contribution turns out to be one of my favorites: "Judgment Passed" by Jerry Oltion, in which a group of astronauts return to earth only to discover that biblical Armageddon has come and gone in the time they've been away, and all other humans are now presumably in either heaven or hell. Another highlight for me -- and a reminder that I still need to track down the original collection it's drawn from -- is "Speech Sounds" by Octavia E. Butler, about an unraveling society where most people have lost the ability to either form or comprehend language.
As those selections demonstrate, the exact doomsday premises vary quite a bit from author to author, which is a good approach for a work like this. There's also a range of tones here; although it's easy to see this genre as exclusively a subset of horror, I tend to prefer the exercises that find some dawning hope amid the bleakness, rather than just humanity's futile last gasps.
Overall, though, like many other anthologies, it's a mixed lot quality-wise. I rated every individual title as I read through them, and the mean and mode ratings both came out to 3-out-of-5 stars for me. That's a score that indicates I like a particular piece more than I dislike it but have not really been blown away, which is true of this book as a whole as well. I'd still recommend it for fans of this sort of fiction, but it's not uniformly strong across its contents.
[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, incest, rape, and gore.]
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As those selections demonstrate, the exact doomsday premises vary quite a bit from author to author, which is a good approach for a work like this. There's also a range of tones here; although it's easy to see this genre as exclusively a subset of horror, I tend to prefer the exercises that find some dawning hope amid the bleakness, rather than just humanity's futile last gasps.
Overall, though, like many other anthologies, it's a mixed lot quality-wise. I rated every individual title as I read through them, and the mean and mode ratings both came out to 3-out-of-5 stars for me. That's a score that indicates I like a particular piece more than I dislike it but have not really been blown away, which is true of this book as a whole as well. I'd still recommend it for fans of this sort of fiction, but it's not uniformly strong across its contents.
[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, incest, rape, and gore.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog