***** People who live in the Swannanoa Valley and/or who know author Bill Forstchen personally will find ONE SECOND AFTER an attractive, undemanding read. That is all that is left when an army brigadier and his troops finally roll in from the east to restore limited Federal authority and start bringing in food and medicine to this part of what is left of the United States (Mexico has turned Texas into a protectorate 500,000 Chinese troops occupy the west coast). In less than a year after an EMP explosion 80% of the people between Asheville and Black Mountain will have died. In between lie the communities of Swannanoa, Black Mountain and the college town of Montreat. ***** ONE SECOND AFTER is centered in a small part of Western North Carolina: from Asheville in the west over the eastern continental divide and down to Old Fort. Its purpose seems to be to arouse readers to demand action from Congress and then to inspire subsidized or free-lance writers to pen useful Civil Defense how-to manuals on coping with such disasters. Forstchen's novel is an overly long expose of how horrible life would instantly become and how much worse things would soon become. Yet the USA has not prepared its citizens for how to survive, starting 'one second after' such an an EMP explosion or explosions. As few as three strategically exploded nuclear weapons fired several hundred miles above the surface of Kansas or Colorado or Pennsylvania would completely knock out everything electrical in the United States, including computers. Its thesis is that the United States is avoidably vulnerable to attack by electromagnetic pulse (EMP) atomic bombing. Forstchen's novel of 2009, ONE SECOND AFTER, is a lumbering didactic novel.

One second after john matherson