Earlier this week, my December 2016 review of Leviathan by Chuck Regan came up as a memory deal on Facebook. Even though this great book seems to only be available in print and by third party sellers, I decided to run my review today for FFB. It was/is a heck of a good read. Also make sure to check out the reads suggested today by Patti Abbott and Audrey Nye Hamilton.
In an alternative world
where Germany won the war and used a V-2 rocket or missile to destroy New York City
with a nuclear weapon, Leviathan tells the tale of a few individuals
in occupied America. In April of 1945, Norm Cromwell was in the sixth
grade and on a field trip a little ways outside NYC when it was destroyed. He
did not realize that he was seeing the rocket trail as the weapon came over the
horizon and hit the city. His parents were back home in Pittsburg so they were not
on the bus with him or the others in his group.
By October of 1962,
Norm is an adult working and living in Philadelphia. One of the many adults
crammed into a row house they live and work in an environment totally under
German control. They are classified as “citizen workers” and have every second
of their lives monitored. The Bundespolizei (BP) are the Gestapo of the Occupied
America Branch of the Third Reich and they use informants and technology to
control everyone and everything. Drone minizeps, shaped like small pigs and
carrying cameras and other surveillance gear, monitor from the air while ground
troops everywhere monitor things. Then there are the informants who may be
friends and might be capable of lying just to get socks, extra rations, and
other benefits.
There are resistance
groups far beyond Philadelphia, according to rumor, but Norm has no plans to be
a part of that. He tries to not think about his parents back home in Pittsburgh
and has no idea if they are alive or dead. In a world where a smile can get you
gunned down by the BP, Norm keeps his head down and does what he is told.
That is until at the
end of the workday on this one particular day when all heck breaks
loose. In the resulting melee Norm, Alan, and Floyd do something that is
unforgivable. Forced to flee, they have no choice, but to go on the run to
survive.
Author
Chuck Ragan has created a very atmospheric and intense alternative history tale
with Leviathan.
As Mr. Regan makes clear in the introduction, the tale is designed off of
several key changes to events during what we know as WW2. It isn’t meant to be
a scholarly treatise on might have been. Instead, Leviathan is simply a
pulp read of dystopian fiction set in an alternative history timeline. It
is also very good.
Material supplied by the publisher in exchange for my objective review.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2016, 2020
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