“Home” is the first part of a series of post-apocalyptic stories that I just started reading on Kindle, penned by author Tom Abrahams. Whilst recently romping around the Scottish Highlands, I took a look at this introductory novel to see what it was like…

“Home” has a great post-apocalyptic cover, though.

What is “Home” about?

Without giving anything away, “Home” follows the story of one Marcus Battle (yeah, dat name), who is a grizzled hero type living on his own in a post-apocalyptic USA. The end-times of choice for Abrahams was viral, a disease known as the ‘Scourge’ (classy) – a type of pneumonic plague that swept quickly across the world, leaving only a handful of immune survivors.

Marcus Battle is an ex-soldier and a doomsday prepper. He lives on a ranch in Shitville Nowhere, Texas when suddenly a terrified woman storms onto his property in the first chapter. After some quick gunplay and staunch, heroic facial expressions, Battle finds out that the woman has escaped from a nearby town controlled by the ‘Cartel’, and is hoping he will help her get her son back.

Of course, nothing is as easy as it ever sounds, and plenty of violence ensues.

Initial impression

So what will you get from this story? As the Amazon page suggests, it’s a sort of Mad Max meets Sergio Leone atmosphere, where evil bandity types rule the region, but a lone hero is capable of swooping in and causing havoc. For someone obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction, this setting most definitely suits me, and it’s why I picked up the novel in the first place. I wasn’t expecting  “The Road”, but the reviews online seemed to think it was worth a read.

Certainly, I can’t say it was my favourite story on the planet. It was inundated with cliches, but not in a fun way – just plain old cliches. Marcus Battle (srs, dat name tho) is the biggest of them all, and you’ve undoubtedly seen his trope in film, TV and books before (grizzled ex-soldier, more skilled at violence than anyone else, doesn’t really want to help the damsel in distress but eventually does).

Then you have the female character, Lola, the pouty damsel. She sits in a weird place between useless and doing alright because a lot of the time she can be a little annoying, but she does pull her weight a bit by the end. She serves her purpose as a catalyst for the story, but I would have liked to see her be a little stronger. That said, this is only Book 1, and it would not surprise me if Abraham’s intention was for this character to grow the most.

Should you give this book a go?

I could go further into what I disliked – frequent Bible references, a lack of clarity on what constitutes a ‘shotgun’ or ‘rifle’ (seems to switch back and forth between the two terms) – but that would be overly negative considering how I ultimately felt.

The enjoyable moments are mixed in with frustrating tropes, which is a bit like adding the wrong ingredient to your soup.

I don’t think the book is as perfect as the Amazon page hypes it up to be, but it certainly isn’t a waste of time, either. The setting here is really cool, and there’s a lot of great emotion in how Marcus Battle came to be in this post-Scourge world. It’s just that the enjoyable moments are mixed in with frustrating tropes, which is a bit like adding the wrong ingredient to your soup. You still have good soup, but you’re going to have to sift through what you don’t like in order to finish it.

If you want to switch off and enjoy an action-packed adventure through a pretty interesting apocalypse, check out “Home”. If you want something that will dazzle, amaze and give you genuine cause for thought, by all means give it a go, but don’t expect the world.

Overall, I hereby give this book a rating of A Cowboy with a Shotgunrifle out of 10.

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