Book Re-Review: One

One by Conrad Williams

An oil rig diver is underwater and misses a terrible occurence. A gamma ray burst has laid waste to the planet. He surfaces to an overwrought and brutal world in this splatterpunk mess. The 'hero' has dogged stupidity and rampant misygony. He has endless twee flashbacks and dreams and memories of his moronic son. The 'hero' aka Richard Jane sets off to find his son.

This is a monumental disaster. A mid-book twist reveals that aliens seeded Earth for germination. The UK and presumably the world is burned, battered and reduced to a scorched sprawl of rubble and corpses. Rats have risen from the depths to gorge on the carrion. New horrors take root. Richard Jane has a callous toxic masculinity. The mid-book twist also has a 10 year time jump. This was crap misery-porn. The ending is incoherent and Richard Jane's obsession with his son is pathological. I read this long ago, my opinion on it has changed since then.

Best Lines:

“Alien fathoms.”

“What future?”

“Why is nobody decomposing?”

“He wasn't going in there either. Not without a flame-thrower and plenty of back-up. And it was another two weeks before he was on incineration detail.”

“All those regrets, all that sorry.”

“Looking like some post-apocalyptic serial killer,”

“Sheep were still standing in fields, but they were burning.”

“The sea was a horrendous churning stew...far away to the horizon, when the waves allowed them to see, they could see huge tankers, upended.”