Book Review: Improvidence by David Herod

When thinking of a post-apocalyptic landscape, most people’s minds would turn to visions of radioactive demons, dead-zones, and bands of raiders sporting technology that littered the now dead planes. A world littered with of packets of civilization hanging by a thread, forced to create new cultures with a mix of high technology and vicious barbarism.

David Herod of

Tooky's Mag

, gives a unique take, where civilizations at some unforeseen time after a near-civilization ending event, find their salvation in embracing older forms of the frontier. The protagonist of the story is a young man with a hankering to make a name for himself in a town in Ohio, and follows his expedition to attain it. The United States, and the state of Ohio, exist in a very different form, as the civilizational degradation has brought everything down to 19^th century norms, alongside digging through the past for useful artifacts from a before times. Here there are diggers in great plastic mines and scavengers of metal from the great windmills that once littered the landscape and fell to the ground from an undisclosed calamity in the forgotten past.

The main character is a Moralist, bound to a strict set of moral codes similar to what one would see from a Puritan society. In this tight knit community one gets a sense such moral codes didn’t get put to the test, the inhabitants seemingly content with the cultural norms.

The journey begins where the main character is put under the direction of an Appalachian scout by the name of Jeremy Brown, who is to navigate their path to Harper’s Ferry, thought to be abandoned for some time. They are tasked to come back with an assessment of the terrain, recommendations for fortifications, and determine the danger of the savage tribes surrounding it. The main character is young, ambitious, and far too eager. Jeremy gives the necessary grounding to his inexperienced companion.

They make their way, first by bicycle and then by horse, and soon find themselves at the end of civilization. The last vestige is a farmhouse by a bridge, resided in by a young girl names Bethy, an older woman named Anna, and a dark patriarch by the name of Luis. The farmhouse, contrary to being a sanctuary, is deeply unsettling, as Luis is sullen and perpetually on edge to the point where the travelers are worried about their survival, and the two girls are openly flirtatious, even with Luis’ strong disapproval. Even in the edge of civilization, the social mores the protaganist took for granted are already melting away.

As they leave the farmhouse, they are fully in uncivilized territory full of barbaric peoples. They have chilling encounters such as the bones of children strewn in with chicken bones, and it only gets worse once they go deeper, requiring them to make use of ancient pre-apocalyptic structures to survive.

Overall, the plot brings to mind tales from Joseph Conrad such as The Outpost of Progress, where the protagonist is forced to come to terms with the brutal realities of life outside of civilization, and the alarming speed in which one can lose your values and, worse, put crime and crime upon yourself as you desperately try to hide your own failings.

The atmosphere in the book is excellent, giving the reader a sense of dread and foreboding in a remote, desolate land. The prose beats on you with tension, while the minimalist explicit explanations of the strange post-apocalyptic world they live in gives an eerie wonder as to what happened to make things this way, and the small reminders of past civilization give a stark contrast to the wild world they live in now. He does a good job of avoiding giving long info dumps.

The main character’s inner thoughts are expounded well, and the reader gets a feeling how easy one thing followed another to reach his predicament, and the disastrous consequences of his actions as his lies and obfuscation only bring him deeper down the road to perdition.