Take That, Mr. King!

Stephen King is widely regarded as the preeminent writer of scary stuff. I've even managed to read a couple of his books, despite the fact that that isn't really my preferred genre. on the whole they were creepy enough, though some of the frightening bits were closer to being silly than terrifying. And the endings! He would have been better off publishing his books without the last ten pages, leaving his readers to wrap up the story themselves. Believe me, the average reader would have come up with something much more fitting.

I just finished a book that is far more terrifying than anything Stephen King's imagination could have conceived. It's titled One Second After, a novel by William R. Forstchen. Unlike Mr. King, Forstchen doesn't rely on things like demonic sedans, grumpy dogs, or (for goodness sake) haunted shrubbery. Forstchen's book is the most frightening book I've read for the sole fact that the premise wasn't cooked up in his imagination. This is a book about how America could easily meet its ultimate end.

Here's the poop. Terrorists, in a well planned and executed attack, detonate several nuclear warheads over the United States at high altitude. The resulting EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) fries anything with an integrated circuit. That means computers, cell phones, automobiles, radios, noisy toys that jiggle and play music that you wish were broken anyway. All of the technology necessary for American society to function becomes landfill. And that's where it gets scary.

Although this is a story about a small town's struggle to survive, Forstchen doesn't pull any punches. Integral to his plot is a rundown of just what would happen to American society in an event like this, and it is really, really ugly. I'm sure some people (maybe even some reading this) might think that if we no longer had computers and cell phones, we'd go back to living at one with nature and live a peaceful, happy-go-lucky existence. Dream on.

Think about it for a minute; without computers we have no electricity, nor do factories produce products, including medications, foods, clothing. Trucks can no longer move those goods, if they were being produced, to where consumers are. Stores cannot now function without computer systems, and our computer-controlled cars can no longer get us to the stores anyway. Money is essentially worthless, so forget buying what you can find. Without medications, untold numbers of people, like diabetics, cancer patients, the elderly, die. Without antibiotics, simple infections become life threatening. Without food being delivered from distant farms and factories, people starve. Law and order break down after only a few days, as was proven recently in Haiti, and not so recently in Hurricane Katrina. Life essentially reverts to how it was in about the 15th century, but in a society that is wholly unprepared for it, and with no knowledge of how to function in such a state. And with no television, radio, or internet, most people would have no idea what's going on. Until I read this book, I could not even imagine what an event like this would have resembled. Thinking about it now makes me want to take up thumb sucking once more.

Forstchen does a good job of hiding the likely sequence of events in the plot, but it is easy to pull out the most gruesome highlights. He gives a good account of when people would begin to die (very quickly), what types of outbreaks and long-forgotten diseases we would be forced to cope with (too many to list), and how many people may die in the end (as many as 250,000,000 [and yes, that is two hundred fifty million]).

While Stephen King scares us with such memorable plot devices as dead, bossy bartenders and bathing specters, William Forstchen terrifies with events that can come to life all too easily. Perhaps the worst part of it all is that, as pointed out in the fore- and afterwords, this scenario is entirely plausible, and all too possible. The technology exists to carry out an attack like this, and America is entirely unprepared for it. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has put preparation for this type of attack on the back burner, or ignored it altogether. Some experts say it is only a matter of time before something like this is visited upon us, and instead of facing it head-on and getting ready, we're searching old ladies at airports and forcing us to take off our shoes to get on the plane. Excuse me if I say that those measures don't make me feel secure.

So if, like me, you want to read a really great book, lose a lot of sleep, and perhaps become slightly paranoid, I would highly recommend One Second After. After reading it, it feels very good to know that I've got a little food put away, a couple guns, and lots and lots of ammo.