This review may contain spoilers.
I was on a book buying ban when I first picked up Before and After. The blurb intrigued me so much that I immediately broke that book buying ban and cracked open the spine, a very rare event as anyone who has ever seen my towering piles of books can attest to.
The absolutely mind-blowing concept of this book? An life-threateningly obese man prepares to leave his flat for the first time in several years in order to have his leg amputated, and as he’s being lifted by the crane through the knocked-down wall of his flat, the apocalypse begins.
I cannot express how much I love the concept of this book. It’s a whole new angle (for me, anyway) on apocalyptic fiction, a refreshing twist as we watch our protagonist, Ben, fight against the call to heroism for as long as he possibly can. In the end, it’s Brown, his dog, who forces him to get up and moving amongst the hordes of wraths outside his flat door. Incredibly relatable, to be honest.
This is also a very believable apocalypse. Ben doesn’t know what’s happened, only that the emergency service workers assisting him into the crane are called away to a larger emergency all at once, and then the firefighters left to watch over him begin to rage as though a switch has flipped in their brains. There doesn’t seem to be any infectious agent or cannibalism that you would see in a typical zombie apocalypse, and nothing is ever explained. Ben also has to figure everything out for himself, and has to cobble together makeshift weapons. After so many books with badass heroes carving holes in hordes of unstoppable brainless bodies, this was the slow-paced breath of fresh air that I needed.
There is one scene of overt gore and, I guess, a bit of body horror. In a book otherwise void of gore, the impact of this one scene is phenomenal. It came totally out of nowhere, and I actually had to put the book down for a few minutes before continuing – the only other book I’ve had to do this with was Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, with the glass scene towards the end.
It’s not flawless, of course. Before and After suffers from one of my least favourite plot devices, which is when a flashback reveals something important in the latter half of the book, and the protagonist then starts casually referring to it when they never did before. Ben also seemed to have a convenient solution for everything, which was only tolerable for so long.
My favourite part of this book by far was Ben’s narrative voice. As a fat person, Ben’s inner voice was exactly the kind of personality/monologue a fat person would cultivate. He was so funny and relatable, and the feeling of seeing myself reflected back so strongly in the narration of someone else’s story was indescribable. Ben’s physical transformation is mirrored with the transformation in his character, and it was such a pleasure to watch him grow into his strengths.
Despite its flaws, Before and After is a remarkable, unique piece of literature (and I know some people have issues calling genre fiction ‘literature’, but for the rest of this review I don’t particularly care), and you should read it for the character work alone.
Check out Before and After on Amazon and Goodreads.
Writing Werewolf 