Refuge
It is twelve years on from a global plague. John Suter believes himself the sole survivor. He has gradually come to terms with his fate and has settled into a steady and self-reliant daily routine. One morning he finds a mutilated body in the river near his house. In his terror, Suter knows he has no choice but to investigate. What he discovers upstream stretches his endurance to its limits and forces him to reassess not only his own humanity, but also his place within the human family he had once believed extinct.
er. The victim's head would be held under the surface until he began to drown.
They were approaching the riverside ash-tree.
"Seumas."
"Yes?"
"Do you believe the tarot is truly puissant?"
"Of ... of course," Seumas said. "It's the Book of Thoth." Had Bex not told him so?
Yesterday evening Bex had again performed a divination, which Seumas had, naturally enough, attended. During it, their fingertips had made momentary contact, and in that moment, it now seemed to Seumas, a faint but special sort of tingle had been exchanged.
In the candlelight, on the scuffed surface of the long table in the dining hall, Bex had placed ten cards in a pattern. The sixth card, to the left of the significator and its cross, had happened to lie directly in front of Seumas. According to Bex, the sixth card indicated what was to happen in the very near future. That card had been the Moon, eighteenth of the Major Arcana. It showed a dog and a wolf, standing at the water's edge
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great read!
Fast-paced with an accessible protagonist. I was impressed enough to donate a bit of change on the author's website in return for making this excellent work freely available to readers.
When this novel first came to my attention, I was excited, since Richard Herley had already authored one of my favorite books, the outstanding The Penal Colony. Then, when I read the blurb and realized what Refuge was about, I admit my excitement faltered a bit. I felt the post-apocalyptic, I'm-the-last-man-on-Earth survival milieu had already been pretty well strip-mined in a hundred works ranging from I Am Legend to Children of Men to The Stand, and I thought it would be difficult for an author to come along in 2008 and give the genre a treatment that was anything other than derivative and tired.
Happily, I was wrong. Herley immediately puts his stamp on the proceedings, much as he does in his other works, with concise, economical detail, great pacing, and a level of research and thinking-through that leaves the reader wondering why other novelists didn’t think of these things. His chops as a writer are simply amazing - several wide cuts above the average writer of popular fiction. Several themes from Herley’s other works are revisited here, most notably the villains’ Christian/Satanic delusions and the protagonists’ struggles for survival in a wild, uncaring natural world, but it’s a very different novel to The Penal Colony.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you like brainy, propulsive thrillers with characters who are complex, flawed and not always easy to love, this is the book for you. And as the book is available for free download (with donations accepted via the honor system) on Feedbooks, Manybooks, or his own website, www.richardherley.com, there’s no excuse not to.
Gripping. Loved it!
Wonderful! A grand adventure.
great!
