Reviews with content warning for Violence - Wanderers

I will preface this by saying this made my Worst Book List - of which I think there's been maybe 5 in my 30+ years of life. This book tried to be too many things and because it tried to be too much, it failed to be the most important thing which is good. I typically would have given up on a book of this length but it held promise up until the last 250ish pages. If you're reading this and aren't at that threshold yet, bail out now.

I did enjoy that this was a twist on the traditional zombie trope, the characters in the novel are referred to as the Walkers, and they appear to be sleepwalking. Things begin small, just a few walkers, but as they begin walking westward more and more Walkers join and our character list begins to swell.

If you're looking for an end of the world kind of book, Justin Cronin's The Passage does end of the world way better, and leaves you with characters that you actually care about. I barely remember the names of the main characters in this novel because the cast list was so swollen by the end.

This book tried to be a commentary on the Trump Presidency (for perspective I read this in March of 2021), a pandemic story/mystery of the start of the disease, a HAL 2001: A Space Odyssey-machine-takes-over robot horror story, and the world ends and we start over all in one book that wasn't 1,000 pages. You cannot do justice to all of those storylines in just 782 pages (paperback version). This book also included a rape scene which I feel was used solely for shock value (in the story it is used as a means of torture, degradation, and control) which would have been enough to make my WBL.(/spoiler>

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jenny_d's review

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dark sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.75

Man... this book could have been a LOT shorter. Lots of repetitive phrases. A few characters that could have been entirely left out, like Pete, without changing the story at all.

I feel like the rape scene in the bunker could have been a fade-to-black kind of thing instead.

There were parts of the story that were pretty good, but by the time I was two thirds of the way through I had lost a lot of interest in the story. It felt like a slog after that. Plus there were so many things about it that were way too squicky for me .

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brigidc's review

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dark mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No

2.0

This book made me so unhappy. It wasn’t the sci-fi fantasy that I felt the back cover’s description portrayed, instead it was dark and gruesome and miserable with no redeeming positive themes or moments. It’s not for everyone, and it wasn’t for me.

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demiwriter's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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megsib's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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luckykosmos's review against another edition

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mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I have very different feelings about this book depending on the angle taken. This book may have aged poorly - it feels weird to say that, only a year in, but one pandemic and chaotic election season later, I spent half of this book going, "That isn't how that goes!" I had issues with suspension of disbelief from the beginning for that reason. But, adding on to that, the handling of racial politics felt... clumsy. It was a plot point, but not a motivation, and not addressed beyond 'these people are dangerous' (except for Bo and Matthew, which I'll get to in a moment). That section of the book could have been taken out and tried by a different author, maybe one with a less white, cishet perspective (because, yes, I don't feel great about the non-cishet rep either), and I feel like little would have been lost.

That being said, this is a wonderful book when it comes to examinations of leadership and faith. Science and religion weren't pitted against each other, but there were different interpretations of the situation based on whose perspective we were in, and for this reason, Matthew's perspective was my favorite - watching him falling into something he didn't believe, and contending with the different ways he lost Autumn or Bo. Watching Bo's radicalization as Matthew lost his faith was interesting - though, again, the exact nature of that radicalization, the white supremacists, felt weak.

I hated the ending. I hated the final reveal with Black Swan. I can't decide if it was decided from an ecofascist angle, or a poorly optimized artificial intelligence (though this could give it too much credit), but from how the past few months have gone and the ecofascist conversations at the beginning of the pandemic, I could not suspend my disbelief long enough to justify it. Maybe I would have a different perspective eight, nine months ago. I wish I saw in this book what authors I love saw, but I don't think Chuck Wendig was the author to tell this story, and I don't think it dropped at the right time.

(I may have rated this higher if it were shorter, but to feel so lukewarm after almost 800 pages is disappointing)

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