I’ve read hundreds of novels published on Kindle Unlimited, and my expectations continue to diminish, but occasionally one stumbles across something genuinely fine. It almost makes the dreck tolerable. Firth gives Science Fiction perhaps its first tweaker hero, William B Good, who pretends to be a cop in a post-apocalyptic (Post-Rapture?) Seattle. William hunts Jack, a serial killer who is bent on reducing the Earth’s remaining population. William makes friends and falls in love in the course of his hunt for the killer. Sounds pretty conventional, doesn’t it? It is not. William is a meth addict, working to become an alcoholic. The plot of the novel unfolds through his eyes, framed by his tortured sensibility, as he struggles with his addiction, his sense of impotence, and his guilt for contributing to the horrible new reality the survivors now confront. Firth creates in William a complex and interesting character—in fact there are no pasteboard figures in -After God-, all the characters are fully realized. More engaging still is that William speaks in a strong, distinct, and vernacular voice. Firth manages to convey a sensibility that feels authentic. This is no trivial accomplishment when his hero is a junkie. It think Firth is striving here for something like serious fiction, and I believe that he has succeeded. The boundaries that distinguish genres have become increasingly blurred in this post-modern age. I thought of Iain Banks and J.G. Ballard as I read this, not because Firth mimics their style—he does not— but because there is a density to the prose that repays the careful reading of it. I suspect that in the not so distant future, we will have to pay book-price to read Firth’s work. At least I hope so.
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2023
