1300 Pages Into an EMP and Still No Seattle

An EMP, a Marine Raider, and a very long walk to Washington

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one. The power grid goes down across the United States, an EMP wipes out basically everything with a circuit board, and Lori, a former Marine Raider, has to get her daughter from Pennsylvania all the way to a rumored safe zone somewhere in Washington State. That’s a continent. On foot, mostly. Through a country that has gone feral in about the time it takes for a Whole Foods to run out of bottled water.

I’m a sucker for this specific flavor of apocalypse. Not zombies, not aliens, just the lights going out and people finding out real fast who they actually are once the rules disappear. Wise leans into that hard in the early chapters. There’s a scene early on with a standoff at a gas station that has nothing to do with gas anymore, it’s about who’s willing to actually pull a trigger, and it’s genuinely tense in a way that made me miss my exit on the highway once while listening to the audio version.

The bones of this plot are solid road trip survival fiction. Mother and daughter, shifting alliances, towns that have gone full warlord, other towns that have gone full cult, and Lori’s military background giving her just enough of an edge that she’s competent without being invincible. If you’ve read any of the EMP prepper subgenre (and there is a lot of it, it’s basically its own cottage industry on Kindle) you know the rhythm. This one does the rhythm well for a long stretch.

Where it earns it, and where it just does not

Look, the pacing in the middle stretch is genuinely good. Wise knows how to end a chapter on a gut punch and knows how to keep you moving. I’ll give credit where it’s due: the depiction of how fast civility evaporates, the way a church group turns predatory, the way a seemingly friendly homestead reveals its rot slowly instead of all at once, that’s craft. It’s not subtle, but it works.

Here’s the thing though. I need to talk about the continuity errors, because they are not small. Lori’s late husband gets called by two different names across the books, and I don’t mean a typo in one throwaway line, I mean it happens enough that if you’re reading closely (and a book like this, weirdly, rewards close reading because you’re tracking who’s alive and who isn’t) it starts to feel like nobody proofread this against itself. That’s the kind of thing that makes me question whether this was written by one person on a deadline or assembled by a small team working off a shared outline, which, honestly, given how many EMP series carry the same broad DNA and how many are published under similar pen names, would not shock me even a little.

And then there’s the ending. Or rather, the absence of one. After five books and thirteen hundred plus pages, the story stops in a diner. Not “climactic final stand in a diner.” Just stops. Seattle never happens. A subplot about finding another character’s father just evaporates. I put the book down and actually said out loud, to an empty room, “that’s it?” I went back and checked the last page twice because I assumed my ebook file was corrupted. It wasn’t. That’s just where it ends.

I want to be honest that this bugs me more than it might bug you, because I have a real soft spot for open ended series, I don’t need everything wrapped in a bow. But there’s a difference between a cliffhanger and a book that simply forgets to resolve the promises it spent a thousand pages making. This is the second one.

If you want to sample it before committing, it’s on Amazon here, and honestly the Kindle preview alone will tell you if the prose style works for you.

The scariest part of any blackout isn’t the dark. It’s how quickly everyone stops pretending to be civilized in it.

About Clay Wise

Clay Wise writes fast, plot forward post apocalyptic fiction, mostly EMP survival stories and a handful of haunted house titles, and publishes at a clip that would give most novelists a nervous breakdown. Multiple completed series, multiple box sets, a steady stream of new titles. Whether that’s one extremely disciplined writer or a name attached to a small writing operation, I genuinely don’t know, and the internet doesn’t say much about the person behind the name. What I can tell you is the prose has a consistent commercial engine to it: short chapters, constant forward motion, danger around every corner. It reads like someone who has studied exactly what keeps a Kindle Unlimited reader turning pages at eleven at night.

If you want the EMP fix without the loose ends, read these next

• One Second After by William R. Forstchen, for the EMP premise done with an actual sense of closure and more political grounding
• The Stand by Stephen King, if you want the “society collapses and reveals people” idea taken to its maximalist, fully resolved extreme
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, for a quieter, more literary take on the same bones, less gunfights, more grief
• Wool by Hugh Howey, if what you actually liked was the competence porn and the slow reveal of what’s really going on

For your book club

1. Lori is a former Marine Raider. Does the book earn her competence, or does it lean on her military background as a shortcut to make every fight scene plausible?
2. The story never actually reaches Washington State. Does the journey itself justify the book, or does an unresolved destination undercut everything that came before it?
3. Several communities the characters encounter turn predatory under the surface. What does the book seem to believe about human nature once the rules disappear?
4. Does the continuity error around Lori’s husband’s name change how you read the emotional weight of that relationship, or is it just a production flaw you can set aside?
5. Would you have preferred a single, tighter book with a real ending, even if it meant losing some of the sprawl and the side characters?