Still others are Spared, teenagers and young adults who should be dead but aren’t. There is also some suggestion that dogs know who is likely to Change or actively Changing.Ī very few people have changed in a different way, developing super-senses that some are not afraid to use to their advantage. Dogs are like canaries in a mine when it comes to the Changed: acutely sensitive and able to alert people to the Changed’s presence. Those still alive-the very young and the very old-must find a way to battle new enemies, not only fellow survivors organized into raiding parties and rigidly-ordered societies (like Rule, a very small, very insular village) but the Changed: teenagers you really don’t want to meet in a dark alley.

In a flash, civilization collapses into a hellish, pre-industrial black hole. Everyone who might be able to fix anything is also history. (So that spiffy new iPad? It’s a brick.) Along the East and West Coasts, the detonation of low-altitude nukes above nuclear waste storage facilities, as well as other facilities going critical because backup generators do not kick in, spews fallout into the atmosphere, turning the moon green and the sunrises bloody. In an instant, the vast majority of the world’s adult population dies power and communications grids are destroyed, and sophisticated electronics, crippled. The Zap: On what starts out to be a perfectly nice Saturday in October, a wave of e-bombs sends electromagnetic pulses sweeping through the sky. Not only will you ruin the perfectly good time you might have had-because no synopsis can do justice to a novel-you will miss a lot of vital information that I can’t include. Really, if you’ve not read ASHES, don’t go any further. In any event, BEWARE: major spoilers ahead. But don’t despair you’ve got time before SHADOWS hits shelves 9/25/12. SHADOWS pretty much picks up where ASHES left off and is a bigger and broader book, with a LOT going on, new characters to meet, new mysteries to unravel.īut I also realize it’s been a while for some of you, so if you DO need a memory-jog, read on. For story-telling purposes–plot, pacing and all that–I decided against a detailed recap. Need a quick refresher, a synopsis of who’s who and what’s going on? Well, you won’t get much in SHADOWS.

Ashes trilogy book 1