Andy in the Apocalypse

As of writing this, I’ve finished both books available on Kindle and I’m working my way through the Royal Road chapters.

Blurb

Forty days until the first System invasion. No pressure.

Andy wanted a quiet life, just his trailer, the Sonoran desert, and a job that didn’t ask much of him. Instead, he got a front-row seat to Tucson’s collapse. Magic rewrote the rules. Monsters stalked the streets. People mutated, or died.

He didn’t plan to be a hero. But when the screaming started, Andy grabbed a broken broomstick and did what he does best: survive.

Now he’s got more than his own skin to worry about. Kids looking to him for protection, neighbors turning to him for leadership, and a trailer park slowly transforming into a fortress. The System’s leveling him up, but not fast enough.

Because the countdown’s ticking, the invasions are coming, and if Andy fails, everyone he’s begun to care about will be slaughtered.

Thoughts

This was fun. A nice mix of base building and you’re standard system apocalypse powering up, and I had a good time the whole way through. And yet I kept staring at where I’d slotted it on the tier list and wondering why I couldn’t push it higher, given I normally love Plum’s stuff. Honestly, I don’t think that’s the book’s fault. This is my 163rd series review, and I definitely don’t review every series I read, so the real answer is probably that I’ve read so, so, so many of these, and the series I’m loving these days are those which show me something new or a fun twist on a genre.

Funnily enough, the strongest parallels here aren’t to other authors, they’re to Plum’s own back catalogue. Trailer parks, Tucson, the desert cooking everything in sight? That’s Cyber Dreams, check. I’m guessing this is where Plum grew up. There’s some early BuyMort in the opening too (which is not one of Plum’s), in that the System shows up, immediately ruins a trailer park, and everyone starts racing to secure the place.

The system itself is fairly standard. Unlock classes by doing things aligned with them, get improvement points when you level, spend those on abilities, spells, or attributes. Around that you’ve got quests, dungeons, upgrading your settlement, the classic aggro settlement next door full of rapists and murderers (this and slavery being two of the most common ‘these are bad guys don’t feel bad for them’ early antagonists), other species invading and planting their own settlements, fae, monsters, bloodlines. All the tropes we know and mostly love. The settlement upgrading is my favourite part, and it’s left me with the realisation that I need to go find more settlement-building stories to scratch this particular itch. The settlement building side of things reminds me more of Apocalypse Parenting than more fantastical settlement upgrading stories (like The Land or Legend of the Arch Magus) or legitimate kingdom-building themes (like The Calamitous Bob).

Like Neon Dust, there’s a well-executed slow-burn romance here, but the focus is wider, sitting on the settlement and the delving party rather than just the primary couple. Andy is the viewpoint character for 90%+ of the story, and he’s a stealthy spear wielder with a secondary focus on being absolutely, unreasonably fast. His interactions with his party and his settlement are positive, which I appreciate, because stories that get derailed by internal politics and an MC too upstanding to deal with underhanded political tactics or backstabbing shit me to tears. Dialogue is all smooth and well-characterised, characters are fairly rich (though the settlement having so many characters mean that many don’t get super fleshed out beyond their job/class).

So: classic system apocalypse, strong MC, and a good split between solo excursions and party combat. Two books are out on Kindle, I’m on the Royal Road chapters now, and book four is up on Plum’s Patreon, so there’s a solid chunk of content sitting there for anyone who doesn’t like jumping into a series too early.