by Robert McCammon
"World Fantasy award-winning, bestselling author Robert McCammon makes a triumphant return to the epic horror and apocalyptic tone reminiscent of his books ''Swan Song'' and ''Stinger'' in this gripping new novel, ''The Border'', a saga of an Earth devastated by a war between two marauding alien civilizations.
But it is not just the living ships of the monstrous Gorgons or the motion-blurred shock troops of the armored Cyphers that endanger the holdouts in the human bastion of Panther Ridge. The world itself has turned against the handful of survivors, as one by one they succumb to despair and suicide or, even worse, are transformed by otherworldly pollution into hideous Gray Men, cannibalistic mutants driven by insatiable hunger. Into these desperate circumstances comes an amnesiac teenaged boy who names himself Ethan--a boy who must overcome mistrust and suspicion to master unknowable powers that may prove to be the last hope for humanity's salvation. Those same powers make Ethan a threat to the warring aliens, long used to fearing only each other, and thrust him and his comrades into ever more perilous circumstances.
A major new novel from the unparalleled imagination of Robert McCammon, this dark epic of survival will both thrill readers and make them fall in love with his work all over again."
This book is an interesting mix of Robert’s earlier work
Swan Song, mixed with Stephen King’s The Stand add a healthy dose of War of the
Worlds and stir. Then you shake all
these up and add a smidgen of comic book action –Zombies, flesh eating and shape
shifting, Area 54 - to it you will have The Border.
This was a great book, although pontificating and plodding at
times; then there are other times that it just felt it was going at warp speed. Some of this book really made me philosophical
and had me pondering the state of our universe, the world cockiness as to how
we think we are ‘the big bad’ and what may or may not be out there; some other
parts just made me roll my eyes.
It seemed to me that the characters had not been fleshed out
very well. I never really felt for any of the
characters. I never had any sympathy for
what they were going through nor did I ever feel enough about them to have any
empathy for them. Learning about Ethan –what he was becoming, what he was is a fascinating
aspect of this book. I wish this aspect
had been explored a bit more. I never thought I would say this about a book,
but I think it should have been maybe 200 to 250 pages longer and then it
really could have
fleshed the characters more, made the story seem less comic bookish and made
more of an impression on me.
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