Just Finished Reading: Long Voyage Back by Luke Rhinehart (FP: 1983)

After a short but eventful voyage Neil Loken, captain of the trimaran Vagabond, is returning home to the Chesapeake Bay to pick up the owner and his guests. It’s just another landing and another trip financed by the New York stockbroker who fancies himself as a free spirit – at least at weekends and holidays. He also has other ambitions for this voyage – to start an affair with the wife of another of his passengers. But fate has other ideas. As the boat approaches the dock and the owner, Frank, makes his way to the dock the anticipated war between the US and the Soviets ignites in the deserts of the Middle East. Mere hours later a mushroom cloud blossoms over Washington and the lights go out across the region. Riding out the first of the shockwaves Frank orders Vagabond to drop him off so that he can fly back to New York to pick up his wife and youngest daughter. Failing to secure a flight he re-joins the trimaran to find they have company – his hoped for love interest and her two children. But what do they do with bombs falling and radioactive fallout expected at any moment – run? Enlist? Save as many as they can? Neil has a clear idea – run to the ocean and stay as far as possible from any targets worth a nuke. Frank wants to fight and protect what’s left and Jeannie wants to survive and protect her kids. Tough decisions need to be made, life and death choices are the only ones that exist and sometimes it’s best to fire first and figure things out later – especially when the whole world is looking after number one as the world does it’s very best to kill itself.

This is yet another of those paperbacks that has been collecting dust on my overburdened bookshelves for decades. As you can probably guess by now I’ve been doing a lot of clearing decks of this sort of thing before they turn into coal under the pressure of the newer books above them. Fortunately, despite some initial reservations, this wasn’t a bad book. Oh, it was still pretty formulaic with most of the characters straight out of central casting (or those endless 80’s straight to TV movies) but at least the writing was pretty decent and the pacing was pretty bang on – not much time for being bored as the world ends! So despite its 495 page heft I managed to knock this off in 4-5 days of mostly enjoyable reading. I am glad though that this was my last ‘End of the World’ novel. After 10 of them – even with the non-fiction breaks in-between – you can’t help looking forward to something that doesn’t involve the deaths of millions (or billions) of people! Death and destruction on that scale can get a bit wearing believe me. But if you’re in to that kind of thing and want a pretty mindless read over a lazy few days you could probably do a lot worse than this. As you might imagine it is overall rather violent and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably find yourself wrinkling your nose at some points throughout the book and, no doubt, being reminded too much about man’s inherent stupidity and self-destructive nature. But if you can cope with all of that you’ll find it a tolerable read.

Next up in Fiction: A random 10 followed by 10 books made into movies (plus guests!)