A review by geckoedit
The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J. Walker

4.0

There's been a deluge of post-apocalyptic fiction lately, possibly in the wake of the success of games like Fall Out 3 and 4, and TV shows like the Walking Dead. Books in which something goes catastrophically wrong and everyday people have to do unspeakable things to survive. Featuring zombies, cannibals and worse, it's a genre that can tend to be quite samey-samey, except for a few surprisingly creative approaches like World War Z, The Girl With All The Gifts and The Road. So, a man named Walker has written a book about runners, and it falls into this category too. I was hesitant to start, worried that it would be another retelling of the same old story; nothing new. I was wrong.

It's hard being a human. Most of the time we're just blind idiots seeking joy in a world full of fear and pain. We have no idea what we're doing and on the rare occasions when we get things right, we're just lucky. Our lives are filled with the humdrum, dust and noise with no meaning. And yet they contain moments that seem to mean something, something we can't describe but want to. Those moments leave holes that we want to fill.

Ed Hill is a flabby, reluctant father with a boring life, until hundreds of asteroids wipe out western civilisation as we know it. Separated from his family, he has to race across the UK to find them before they disappear forever. If he makes it that far, that is...

You don't run thirty miles, you run a single step many times over. That's all running is; that's all anything is. If there's somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that's all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don't have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you've come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what's in front of you and how you're going to move it behind you.

My first impression was pretty positive: I like Ed. I like his snark, his bitterness, his self-deprecating humour. I like Bryce more. I like that the story is set in Edinburgh rather than North America, and I like that Ed is a completely average person. Reading this book might have made me work out just a little bit harder than usual, in solidarity. It's an apocalypse story without all the silliness that usually makes them require a large helping of suspension of disbelief: aliens didn't throw rocks at the Earth, the dead stay dead, and there's nothing too woo-woo that can't be explained by science (and dehydration). It's a straight-forward tale told in down-to-earth words.

My eyes were drawn to the water lapping around the edges of the city, out of place and unsure of itself against its new shore. I saw tiny white specks, gulls moving around on the waves and flapping clumsily up onto high window ledges, the urban cliffs in which they were now making nests. An erosion was beginning, which, I imagined, would result in a beach after enough time. The sand would be made of bones, credit cards, fridges, cars and sofa springs. Dunes would form and grow tufts of grass. The sun might eventually shine on them, a young boy might tumble down them, laughing, rolling in the trillion, trillion fragments of debris and detritus, dust ground from the lives who had once walked the bed of the rolling ocean into which he crashed. The living would run through the dust of the dead, just as they always had done.

While there are some stunning descriptive passages like the one above, and some powerful musings on the meaning of life, family and how Ed's mentality changes as he becomes better at running, I felt disconnected from it, in some ways. Sometimes I was fully absorbed, but sometimes the pace would slow to a bit too much of a halt or my mind would start to wander a little. I didn't find the other characters particularly interesting and Ed's detachment from them meant that I struggled to connect with (and care) about them. I feel like this would make an excellent movie, and perhaps the movie might be better than the book. I did find the book thought-provoking and inspiring. However, I feel like it lost its way towards the end, with a strange, rambling hallucinatory sequence that didn't make much impact and a very unsatisfying ending.

That other beast inside you, the one you rarely see? You have it tethered tight. It watches and waits while you mess up your life, fill your body with poison and muddy your mind with worry. For some it takes just one call to free it. For others it takes 500 miles of agony.

For those who like survival stories with gore, the raw humanity of society without rules or order, and especially those who like to run, this is a great book. It is exciting and entertaining, most of the time. For me, I guess I wanted something a little more; it's different from a lot of books in the genre and I liked its originality.  Character- and plot-wise it wasn't quite perfect, but I still enjoyed it.