A Stack of Books

I’m forgetful. I guess I should worry more about it; my mother had severe senility if not Alzheimer’s disease, but I think my forgetfulness is less a sign of physically impaired brain function than it is indicative of the raising of three kids, running a game publishing business, and living a life that moves in several directions at once. Whatever the cause, the result is that I keep a stack of books I want to read on a shelf near my desk. You see, there are hundreds of books in our house, many of them unread, and if I don’t keep the hot-read list (for lack of a better couplet) in plain view, I’ll forget about them.

 I was perusing the stack this morning and realized why the fiction I write is the fiction I write. The top three books are:

1. The War After Armageddon (Ralph Peters). A grittily realistic book about a war to retake Israel after a Muslim occupation. Peters is an engaging writer. Most, but not all, of his novels are military fiction. Think Clancy, but with an edge, or Harold Coyle, but with three-dimensional characters.

2. 13 Bullets (David Wellington). Think detectives, think vampires, think lots of vampires. David Wellington broke on the scene with the Monster Island trilogy. I read the first one. It was okay, certainly not Day by Day Armageddon, but okay. This book comes with strong recommendations from several people I trust. No conflicted, glistening vampires here. As one Amazon reviewer writes, “13 BULLETS is to vampire stories what lethal gladiatorial games are to formalized boxing. If you want blood, you got it.”

3. The Rising (Brian Keene). Picture Stephen Colbert, fist shaking in front of face, eyes to the sky. “Curse you Brian Keene!” That’s how I felt when I discovered The Rising. That was supposed to be that World at War: Revelation's name! Imagine further, if you will, my chagrin when I discovered that I wanted to read Keene’s book. It’s a zombie apocalypse, in which one man treks across the country to rescue his son.

Now that’s a diverse selection of fiction, but—zombies excepted—it sums the content of that World at War: Revelation. The books contains, in fact focuses on, combat between the protagonists in a Third World War circa 1985. Soviet T-72 tanks battle M1 Abrams, American infantry fight against their Russian counterparts, but there is much more. Called by this violence on a grand scale, this thinning of the human population, things that have hidden among us for centuries are rising (See, wouldn’t The Rising have been a great title?), and these things have their own war to wage. It is the juxtaposition of these two wars that provides Revelation its unique blend of paranormal and military adventure.