Book Title: Fury of the Fifth Angel
Author: Pat & Chris Hoffman
Copyright Date: 2013
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-4575-2429-5
Amazon Link: Fury of the Fifth Angel
Audio, e-book or foreign translation available: Kindle available
Suitable for children: No.
I had just finished reading The End of the Age when Fury of the Fifth Angel arrived in my mailbox. I hadn’t even gotten started on writing my review of “The End of the Age”. Given the title and the subject matter, I knew I was going to have to bump Fury of the Fifth Angel up to the top of the queue. It didn’t hurt that from the get-go this one is an attention grabber.
This novel has not just one major meteorite strike the Earth but rather a series of meteorites, as Earth passes through a previously unknown meteorite stream. Initially these are small meteorites and do relatively little damage, but they are enough to create a public panic. The government is doing everything in its power to keep this news under wraps until scientists can determine how much of a risk the Earth faces and until preparations can be put in place to maintain civil order.
One of the main characters, John Halloran, is an east coast power grid operator, and another, Devon Grant, is a solar technician at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. John is a customer of Devon’s, because the electrical grid can be affected by such things as solar flares. Dialog revolving around the two of them affords opportunity for educational discussions about our vulnerabilities to solar activity and the fragility of the electric grids, upon which we are so dependent. The authors make excellent use of those opportunities.
The novel has more sub-plots than I could gracefully keep track of. Some of these came and went, while others were eventually tied in with the main plot. While a bit challenging to keep track of, all of these were useful for illustrating the various ways in which society is likely to react to a major upheaval. The authors worked in an impressive array of character types by means of these tangents. They have everything from the career con-man to gangsters to the sociopath to the mentally deranged at one end, and from the old ladies’ bridge club to the pediatrician to the barista to truck drivers at the other end.
The political picture is an interesting one. The reasons for keeping the public in the dark about their impending destruction are well developed. There is everything from pride to the fear of fallout from having cut the budgets of the programs that would have offered a means of coping with the problem. There is also the drama of one person, who takes their job seriously and does it well in spite of the wishes of the rest. While unpopular, those actions end up validated.
However, I must state, this novel definitely falls in the “rated R” category. The majority of the characters in this book seem to have all the sexual inhibitions of rabbits. I found myself wondering if the authors didn’t simply make one list of male characters and one list of female characters and then draw lines between all of them and some of them given more than one line. I would say something on the order of ninety percent of all that sex had little or nothing to do with the development of the plot. This book could have been substantially cleaner. On the plus side, at least the pastor is left with his morality intact.
It should also be noted that this novel does not quite conclude. A sequel is planned. The key characters are left in position for what should be an exciting read about coping with the chaos.
The book is well crafted and holds the reader’s attention, but I cannot give it the recommendation I would like to. There is no justification for the cesspool morality.
— Harry, SurvivalBlog Book Reviewer