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WoGF Review: The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy
Guest blogger and WWEnd Uber User, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his blog series Philip K. Dickathon and The Horror! The Horror! He can also be found on his own blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com.
When one of the local workers on a Yucatan archeological site breaks his ankle, the local hospital fixes him up but his mother, the cook for the archeological team, insists that the local curandera be brought in to check him out as well. This old woman also wants to meet Elizabeth Butler, the middle-aged and well-known leader of the team. She identifies Butler as a witch.
Butler is not bothered by this opinion. She can even appreciate it. All her life she has lived with shadows of the past inhabiting her world. This has made her an excellent archeologist, although on this dig for the first time one of these “shadows” has begun to speak to her. But Butler knows that a witch has power, which is better than being crazy, a diagnosis that removes your power and puts you under the power of others. She has been considered crazy in her life as well. Years before, when she saw no way out of a marriage that was suffocating her, she slit her wrists. This suicide attempt got her institutionalized. When she got out, she abandoned her husband and small daughter, went back to school, and began the life she has now.
WoGF Review: The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
When Beth Besse (Badseedgirl) is not preparing for the coming zombie apocalypse, or having long, and often bitter arguments with her sister over whether “Night of The Comet” is actually a zombie movie (well of course it is, it even says it in the movie description), she can be found curled up somewhere in her Tennessee home reading SF and Horror of questionable quality. Her guilty pleasure reading almost always involves urban fantasies or Southern Fried Vampires. Her Goal is to be able to someday boast that she has read every title in at least one WWEnd book list. (And finally convince her sister that “Night of the Comet” is a Zombie movie)
In the prologue, we are first introduced to a woman who is running away from San Francisco days after the plague. She is about to have a baby. Alone and scared she starts to “hallucinate” an angel. The woman promises the angel that it can name her child. This child grows up on a farm outside a small farming community led by a man called “Four Star”. This self-appointed leader’s mission is to bring back the United States of America, by any means possible including force. Through his actions, the girl’s mother dies, but before she does she sends the girl to San Francisco to warn the people there that Four Star is coming to invade.
The story starts 16 years after a mysterious plague has wiped out most of the population of the world. Small pockets of humanity survived and created what can only be described as a series of city states where the population survives through production of necessities and through foraging through the pre plague leftovers. Each area of, in this case, California seems to have created its own form of government according to the needs of the people. But what happens when one man decides that he is way is the only way?
