Lone Star Book Blog Tour: House of the Rising Sun by Richard Cox (Review)

Both a frightening apocalyptic story set in the southern United States and a character-focused, deeply moving literary thriller.

What would happen if technology all over the world suddenly stopped working?

When a strange new star appears in the sky, human life instantly grinds to a halt. Across the world, anything and everything electronic stops working completely.

At first, the event seems like a bizarre miracle to Seth Black–it interrupts his suicide attempt and erases gambling debt that threatened to destroy his family. But when Seth and his wife, Natalie, realize the electricity isn’t coming back on, that their food supplies won’t last, they begin to wonder how they and their two sons will survive.

Meanwhile, screenwriter Thomas Phillips–an old friend of Natalie’s–has just picked up Skylar Stover, star of his new movie, at the airport when his phone goes dead and planes begin to fall from the sky.

Thomas has just completed a script about a similar electromagnetic event that ended the world. Now, he’s one of the few who recognizes what’s happening and where it will lead.

When Thomas and Skylar decide to rescue Natalie and Seth, the unwilling group must attempt to survive together as the world falls apart. They try to hide in Thomas’s home and avoid desperate neighbors, but fear they’ll soon be roaming the streets with starving refugees and angry vigilantes intent on forming new governments. It’s all they can do to hold on to each other and their humanity.

Yet all the while, unbeknownst to them, Aiden Christopher–a bitter and malignant man leveraging a crumbling society to live out his darkest, most amoral fantasies–is fighting to survive as well. And he’s on a collision course with Thomas, Skylar, and the Black family…

“We never plan for problems, even when we know they’re coming. We wait until the problem is already here, and this time that was too late.”

Attention all you preppers and survivalists! House of the Rising Sun by Richard Cox will knock your thermal socks off because when the you-know-what hits the fan, and when everything boils down to who survives and who doesn’t, it isn’t all about how much food and ammo you’ve amassed or how many survival skills you have under your belt.

When a star goes supernova and fries all things electronic on Earth, screenwriter Thomas Phillips has just picked up actress Skylar Stovar from the DFW airport in Texas. Modern cars stop working, and planes crash to the ground. In Oklahoma, Seth Black is in the middle of trying to commit suicide when the running car in the closed garage stops working. Natalie, Seth’s wife, is in a drink cart on the golf course and can only think about picking up her 7-year old twin boys from school. The lives of these six people eventually crash together, setting up the plot of survival that includes extreme hunger and thirst, sexual fantasies, greed and selfishness, and the realization that it only takes a day or two for civilization to collapse into a heap of tragedy, death, and a Lord of the Flies scenario. Many people don’t take long to degenerate into their primal selves that seem to draw on their current political/socioeconomic world views. Humans are divided into the haves and have nots, the strong and the weak, and the healthy and the sick. Life often narrows dramatically into an either/or panorama.

Richard Cox has the uncanny ability to present individuals with varying opinions/thoughts/lifestyles, such as liberals and conservatives and males and females. No one side of any of these groups is given emphasis over the other because all viewpoints and feelings are real and permeate our societies. This book shows most sides, except for the children. The twins, Brandon and Ben, are along for the ride, but the reader never sees their specific points of view. If any children survive, they will be the ones calling the shots in a future world, and their views will be shaped by what they have seen and what they are forced to do and endure during their formative years.

The pacing is quick, the writing is uncomplicated yet riveting, and the science fiction aspect is lightweight, focusing more on personalities and primitive behaviors that bubble up in otherwise sedentary, everyday people. In this story, Thomas Phillips has written a screenplay that coincidentally mimics what has just happened to the world. Thomas, during his research and fear of such a possible end-of-the-world occurrence, has prepped a safe room with an adequate supply of food, but will that save him? Can anyone fully prepare for an unknown apocalyptic world? Most people in House of the Rising Sun (and no doubt in the real world) are too soft and dependent on technology to even think about living without electricity or acquiring the necessary skills to survive hunger, thirst, the elements, and extremists living out their fantasy of using intimidation and violence to control their idea of inferior or weak groups of people.

An interesting aspect of House of the Rising Sun is that some of the characters feel like they are living in Thomas’s screenplay – that an author can orchestrate the end of the world and peoples’ lives and choices simply by writing about it. Those who believe in God will say He is the ultimate author of our fates and the fate of the world, so that idea would not be that far-fetched. What is scary about this book, and so many other apocalyptic books, is that we don’t know what type of person we will be when that fan gets hit and the world as we know it crumbles. Will we do anything to survive, even kill mercilessly or do unspeakable things, or will we show compassion and work together to survive and thrive? Would it be more realistic if we were both, changing from day to day? House of the Rising Sun explores these shifting personalities and behaviors with realistic equatability and effectiveness.

“But what’s the point of surviving all this if survival is the only point?”

I received a free copy of this book from Lone Star Book Blog Tours in exchange for my honest review.