Ruins by Dan Wells

The covers for these books are probably the most unimaginative covers possible. If I wasn’t a fan of Dan Wells I never would have read these books.

Ruins is a good end to this trilogy. It’s more gruesome and violent and filled with more drastic decisions. Kira and her friends are faced with the world ending again as the Partials invade the human settlement on Long Island in a hope of finding the expiration that they are all rapidly approaching and the humans retaliate with unmitigated force as they face another kind of extinction themselves.

Kira has discovered the cure for both their problems but she just has to make somebody listen to her before they kill each other.

This is an exciting novel and a good end for the trilogy with a satisfying conclusion. Dan Wells throws some horror elements into this book, some of them gruesome and others terrifying and that is where Dan Wells shines. He is always at his best when he’s scaring the reader into having nightmares.

The relationships are not quite as believable. There’s not enough emotion and too much talking about it to feel real.

There isn’t much more to say. This is the conclusion of a trilogy and Wells mostly sticks the landing. There are some frustrating characters that make some unfortunate choices and there are some wonderful characters that keep the book interesting and entertaining to the end.

I liked this series. It had a good premise that builds some tension right form the start. Dan Wells taught me in the first book that medical lab work could be tense and in this book he taught me about character choices.

My biggest peeve with this book, though, is the magic of genetics. In the second book the use of computers was so outside the realm of how computers work that it was completely unbelievable. This book has characters doing genetics to change the weather and create diseases and heal themselves and live in toxic wastelands and breathe underwater and kill the human race and make people live only eighteen years and eventually it felt like magic rather than science. There was a team of geneticists that can do pretty much anything they want, and in a very short period of time (a few months) and it continually popped the balloon from which I had suspended my disbelief. After falling enough times I gave up and stayed on the ground.

The tension is real, though, and this wraps up a series that I have enjoyed reading.

Fragments by Dan Wells

Let me just start by saying that if this wasn’t written by Dan Wells I likely would never have picked it up. The cover is possibly the least interesting book cover I have ever seen. Luckily, I was able to get past that.

I feel like there are certain things that Dan Wells does really well and things that he is only mediocre at. His settings never feel fully realized. It’s almost like the places he describes are only partially there, like the distance is shrouded in that mistiness that video game designers use when your computer doesn’t have enough memory to show the horizon. When he is describing real cities like in much of this book the setting feels like a place that he drove through or visited once, or even worse looked up on a map.

With that out of the way I can talk about what Dan Wells is good at. He is good at atmosphere, terror and mystery.

Fragments picks up where Partials left off with a world broken by disease and war. Kira is trying desperately to find a cure that will save the human race from the disease that is slowly killing them and hopes to discover the secrets to her own past at the same time.

Kira is no different from most teenage literary protagonists in that she wants to figure out where she fits what she is and why she is there. These are universal questions which is part of the reason they are used in young adult fiction so much.

Dan Wells channels the atmosphere of desolation and destruction remarkably well. The world feels like our world after it has been rapidly depopulated. The part of me that loves ghost towns longs to look into this world, to explore the ruins of our civilization. The emptiness and the danger are real but I couldn’t help but wonder if the fortuitous use of canned food in this society twelve years after the apocalypse is realistic. How many cans of tuna re still good twelve years later? Probably a surprising number but it made me wonder every time they stopped and ate some tuna — also carrying cans across the desolated midwest sounds like a very bad idea. The degradation of gasoline over time is treated realistically but the characters are still able to find rope in hardware stores and long abandoned computers start working as soon as they are supplied power.

I’m not even sure how realistic that is. I have computers that I have put away in storage and fired them up and they work great six or seven years later. Theoretically, if nothing happens to them, then they should still work. I also know that modern data farms go through an unseemly number of hard drives every day due to mechanical failure. They are constantly building in redundancies and swapping out parts because when you have a million processors and hundreds of thousands of hard drives, chances are one of them is going bad right now. I feel dubious that turning on power to a data farm twelve years after it died that the entire things would work without some kind of maintenance. (Almost all the uses of technology in this book are problematic, unrealistic and sometimes jarringly misunderstood but I’m trying to get past that.)

That’s probably the least unrealistic part of the book because Kira and company traverse most of the breadth of the continent on horses in a barren wasteland with no food or water and the only rain falls as acid that burns and scorches the skin and poisons and kills everything. The midwest United States is not populated enough to find shelter every day, it just isn’t. I’m not even convinced you would want to do it with a car under those circumstances.

Leaving aside the fairly naive discussions of computers and networking usage, and the impossibleness of the journey Dan Wells is great at telling a story that is equal parts fascinating and terrifying. Some of the action scenes and moments of tension are the best I’ve seen in quite some time.

That’s because these are the areas in which Dan Wells excels. Atmosphere, terror and mystery. The mystery in the book is intriguing, if a little bit of a letdown upon discovery, and drives almost all of the plot. The terror both long term and short term feel real and powerful. This is a delicate act to pull off. Dan Wells expertly builds a world that is so completely broken that even living in it is terrifying — the future is bleak, possibly nonexistent — and the he fills in the moments with bits of real tension and fantastical action set pieces.

I’ve begun to feel that Dan Wells hasn’t improved as much in his skills over the course of his novels as I would have expected. Many of his weaknesses still remain. I find with each novel my desire to read the next one decreases just a little. Here’s hoping I like the next one more.

Partials by Dan Wells

Partials is a powerful post apocalyptic drama about life and what one might be willing to do to save it. It is brilliantly written and told with the kind of heart breaking tension that only a parent could appreciate, with a few minor aberrations to mar its apparent perfection.

Fourteen years ago ParaGen created an army of genetic soldiers, called Partials, to fight wars for the United States. They quickly won the Partials War and came home and rebelled, unleashing a virus that wiped out the entire human population. So virulent that it caused nearly instant death, the virus struck down the entire world until only a few thousand people survived, somehow immune to the virus. However, their children are not. For fourteen years not a single infant has lived more than fifty six hours. The human race is running out of gas.

This is where Kira comes in, she is a trained nurse in the maternity ward of the hospital where the survivors have banded together. Every day she watches mothers giving birth, hopeful that theirs will be the one that lives. Every day she watches infants struggle to live and then collapse and die from the virus.

Kira vows to change things and then goes about doing just that.

This is a strict departure from Dan Wells’s former style. There is little of the horror sensibility that his John Cleaver books had but I think this is a much stronger book than those ones were. For one thing, nobody does dark like Dan Wells. This is a future that is bleak and horrifying and astonishingly gripping. The prose is much improved. Dan Wells has always been eminently readable but this book passes into another, even deeper layer (that’s exactly like the first one).

There are a lot of characters, but they are all distinct and diverse and have a variety of skills. The characters never got confusing and their actions were always reasonable.

I have three complaints. One is incredibly minor.

I’m kind of tired of the kind of story where the protagonist is the only person in her society who sees something wrong with what is going on and is willing to do something about it. It’s sort of a trope that has been played ad nauseum. However, that very quality about them is what makes them a protagonist instead of a sidekick so it’s kind of inevitable.

The other two complaints are about things that happened at the end. I’ll try to explain without spoiling anything.

First there is an event toward the end of the book where Kira discovers something about herself. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a great surprise and really shocking — if I say any more I’ll give it away — but it really wasn’t. The reason for that was because earlier in the book Kira does something completely unnecessary in order to not discover that thing about herself yet. I’m being really vague here but the author’s fingers were all over the page turning Kira away from doing the logical thing so that the big reveal could come later.

My final complaint is about the very end and I’m going to go ahead and just give spoilers for this — though minor ones. After all the riots and government corruption and plots to create a totalitarian regime the people went ahead and reelected the same officials that had been plotting the demise of what was left of human civilization? I understand that you still need to have political intrigue in the next book but it felt so far-fetched I had a hard time believing it.

These are minor problems. The book is brilliantly written and powerfully told. It’s about trying to save life. It’s about the sacrifices that must be made along the way. It doesn’t get much better than this.