Fetch The Culled (The Afterblight Chronicles, #1) Documented By Simon Spurrier Distributed As Publication

pretty good read. I enjoyed it enough to be curious how the next one goes, Fun, fastpaced and brutal. The Culled is an action tale set against the backdrop of the apocalypse, The narrator is amoral and likable, the world is vivid and bloody, I will definitely read more books in the Afterblight Chronicles series, In the near future, a virus devastates humanity,killing everyone who has any blood type other than ONegative.
We follow a cutthroat killer as he murders his way through various cults and factions across America,

It's pretty violent and our hero is pretty successfully portrayed as a pyschotic murderer, while somehow remaining partially sympathetic.
I did like how good he was at killing, Despite being the strongest guy around,he never felt too overpowered,

The story itself was a little ropey, When we finally learn the main character's motivations aboutpages too late IMO, it falls a bit flat.
Nate and occasionally Rick wereoccasional bright sparks, but huge plot contrivences mostly ruin them for me,

Wouldn't really recommend unless you're a big fan of action movies, Even then, I'd say just watch Mad Max instead, I did not have much luck with the last two Abaddon series that I tried the Pax Britannia and Age of God openers were both trite with mediocre writing.
With "The Culled," the Afterblight series shows more promise, I'm not saying this is the greatest book ever, but the pacing is fast and the writing is surprisingly intelligent.
It has the feel of a decent popcorn action movie, which is all I ask from my pulp fiction.
I will continue with this series for now,

Two peeves: First, early in the book, Spurrier refers to a an Massault rifle as a "semiautomatic," even after explaining that it fired in threeround bursts.
It's hard to take he author of an action book seriously when he gets such an obvious and basic detail wrong.
Second, Spurrier repeatedly cites a worldwide deathtoll ofbillion people,billion! By all measures, this novel takes place in a near contemporary time, when the world's population is seven billion or so.
The planet would be destroyed before it could hold,billion people. What am I missing/misunderstanding, Mr, Spurrier You want rampaging biker gangs Gun battles Hand to hand combat Blood and gore A relentless killer in pursuit of his mysterious goals Devastated cities Action scenes that read like movies All tied up in a postapocalyptic world brought down by a virus

This book is for you.


The nameless protagonist gets a signal after five long years that sets him on a course of action that leaves a bloody wake behind him.
Don't think that he gets through it all unscathed, This is not some overpowered superhero, In fact, he's not a hero at all, But he keeps moving ahead against terrible odds because his ultimate goal is, . . you'll have to read to find out,

I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone, There are too many flashbacks, there are a couple of outcomes that are too close to a deus ex machina, the author needed to do a little more research, and some people might find the native american sections offensive.


But the action scenes were bright, fast, and vivid, When I found out the author had worked on graphic novels, I just nodded, and said ohhh riiight.
There were a few tiny moments that felt like a panel from a comic book,

Last, if you like the Mad Max movies, you might like this, This is getting abecause of all the constituencies in the book from the first book and this one.
Plus the fact that the author has no ideal of geography, Is it so hard to look at a map if you don't know about the area you are writing about Two days to go from Miami to Vegas Yeshours on today's roads.
Five years without maintenance Think the trip would take just a little longer, I believe this is the book that originates the Afterblight Chronicles, Except I'm not sure it's the beginning of the overall chronology of the books, I could look it up but in my opinion, it doesn't matter in the Chronicles, There's two trilogies. I'd read those in trilogy order but otherwise I've found no problems with skipping around,

This was myth ABC read and I'm currently in myth as I write this.


The story begins with Nate, a man who has been merely existing since the Cull beganyears ago.
He had been working a desk job inside MIas a semi retirement from being an unofficial government assassin and performer of other unofficial dirty ops.
He was thoroughly trained to be a soldier, to never give up,

Which serves him in good stead as one day among the many, holed up in the deeper parts of MIheadquarters, he sees a signal come in.
There hasn't been one for years,

And the signal, ignites him into a mission of his own, One for which he truly will stop at nothing to finish,

The characterization of Nate as more soldier than human is important as there is a lot of violence along the way.
He's long since made peace with taking lives and is very skilled in proactive selfdefense which from the outside would seem like pure mayhem and murder.


The story was very good and I recommend it except to those who don't like heavy aggressive violence on the part of the protagonists.


By contrast, the other four books I've read so far, the protagonists were not previously soldiers by nature.



A final note: the book ends at a good point but it's quite clear the story isn't over.
Unless a different author took on this particular storyline, Spurrier hasn't written the followup book yet, This is an interesting entry in the Afterblight series, It has a number of interesting twists, and it is very fast paced, I enjoyed the School Is Out Forever trilogy another Afterblight offering more then this, However,there is a lot of vital Afterblight info offered in this book, so that really makes it a must read.
If you're going to get into the Afterblight Universe, then this is the book you should read first.
Too long, too slow and too many characters for a story were so many people were supposed to be dead.
great book, good action, crazy story, it just draws you in, wanting so badly to find out what it is all about Post world wipe, crazy cults, and Mad Max invincibles So awesome.
The story and plot were great, The writing, I thought was a little wonky, the way it kept jumping from past to present in three different time periods.
He would switch characters in the first person point of view, which i don't mind but, sometimes it wouldn't be obvious until a paragraph or two.
. . With all that being said i probably will continue the series at some point Yeah, spoilers, Boilerplate, polite version: I promise I don't "spoil" anything about this book that would have bothered me had I known about it in advance of reading this book.
That said, I cannot think of anything I have read in my life that would have been spoiled had I known the plotadvancing facts.
And this is not, I promise, a brief Cliffs Notesstyle detailed summary of the story, Perhaps the only real way to "spoil" a book is to detail any serious flaws in logic, to the extent that you then can't get them out of your head as you read the book.
I can't promise that I don't to that but neither can anyone else,

I wanted to read The Serpent Uncoiled, a more recent book by Spurrier, but it had such glowing reviews I decided, rather than going in cold, having never read anything by him previously, to first get a sense of his writing from something else he had written.


This novel is the first book in a "shared universe" series of novels, called the Afterblight Chronicles, each book written by a different author but taking place in the same overarching story.
The "blight" of the series' title is a virus that ravaged the planet, killing just about everyone who doesn't have a particular blood type.
It's postapocalyptic mayhem, starring a former mercenary with a

remarkable ability to be at the wrong place at the right time and to survive the everescalating body count.
True to its pulp aspirations, it reads only slightly less quickly than it appears to have been written.
It's more told than written, uttered as a fullsteam streaming monologue by the main character, with occasional italicized asides from other characters.


I don't know that I will read another book in this series, but I might try another of the "shared universe" books.
And I'm looking forward to The Serpent Uncoiled, .