Book Review: Shelter In Place by KW Callahan (Pandemic Diaries #1)

It can’t happen – our society is too civil, our civilization too advanced, our technology too developed to ever allow for a breakdown of law, order, government, and our way of life and living. At least that’s what we tell ourselves so we can sleep soundly at night.

But it CAN happen, and now it HAS happened. A pandemic far more deadly than any virus the world has ever seen is spreading worldwide. It puts it predecessors – SARS, bird flu, Ebola, and even horrifyingly lethal outbreaks like Spanish Influenza and the Plague – to shame.

Experience this pandemic and its terrible effects first hand through the eyes of a family just doing its best to survive.

My Review:
This is a second series set in the world of the dreaded SuFlu pandemic. In the first series we see John try to gather all his loved ones together and flee the oncoming virus. His cousin Chris never shows up and this series tells the story of Chris and his family in the form of diary entries. I admit that I'm not normally a fan of this format of book as it can take away the tension of situations by telling the reader about what happened after the event. However I did actually like this one.

Chris is just a normal guy, living in an apartment complex with his wife Kate and kids Dylan and Violet. Their condo is on the third floor and they are not preppers so they don't start he book with endless supplies packed away. They decide that moving out of the condo and getting out of the city is too dangerous with kids who are eight and four, which is understandable, and by the time they are thinking about having to leave, the streets are being controlled by the gangs giving them no option but to stay. Now these gangs are moving street to street, looting the meagre supplies that everyone has and enslaving or murdering the people that they find. As the bad guys get closer to their hiding place, Chris has to come up with ways to delay them and try to protect his family. I liked seeing an ordinary, normal man with no training trying to come up with plans to save his family and his few remaining neighbours.  

Despite the diary format and Chris telling us about the events afterwards, the author still manages to inject some of the tension of an apocalypse event into the plot. Chris as our narrator describes the early days of the outbreak when schools and work places were going, where Kate was worried about her internet business going under due to lack of sales and the decision to get in some supplies of food and water just in case. He also gathers things he might need from the packed storage unit under the building and then looks at how to secure the entrances to the building when chaos breaks out on the street. These are all reasonable actions for an ordinary guy to take as the crisis gets greater. I liked the description of the boredom in the condo, trying to keep the kids amused and quiet, the issues of hygiene with a limited water supply, and the terror of seeing the bad guys get closer every day.

I liked the characters because they could be the family living next door to you. There was nothing super human about them and Chris does make a few mistakes during the crisis. I think the book does a good job of conveying the growing worry as the TV reports get more serious and the pandemic gets out of control. Hiding from people becomes the sensible option but when the TV does go dead, there is no news of the outside world and curiosity to find out what is happening grows. I can imagine dealing with the isolation of this situation, but even the most prepared prepper with a lot of food would have to deal with the growing fear of the bad guys looking to storm the building. Sadly for Chris and his family, the survivors in his building are an old woman and a single mother with her teenage son, rather than a prepper with a pile of weapons to assist them. I liked the realism of their story and the fact that they couldn't just shoot their way out of the situation.

The thing that puzzles me most about this book is what happens at the end. The bad guys find the diary of Chris, which he has left lying about as he tries to draw the men away from his family. But if any of them read the last pages of that diary, Chris has written where his wife and kids are hidden! We know this because we read that final diary entry. Wouldn't he have carefully hidden that evidence before the big fight? At no point during the book does Chris mention getting the letter from John telling him where the family are all meeting. It seems weird to never mention it yet keep the letter from John in the diary ready for the bad guys to find. Why keep it if there was no intention to try and go there and why not mention even getting it in the pages of the diary? I get Chris ignoring John's doomsday warnings, thinking he is a crackpot, but John is not mentioned when events prove him right. I found that strange.  

It is easy to be critical of some of the decisions that Chris made, especially in hindsight but I like books that make me think about what I would do in this situation, what decisions I would take at each point in the plot. It means I'm fully engaged with the book and the characters and that was certainly true. I like flawed heroes who don't get it right every single time. I liked the writing and the way the author unfolded the story, getting a bit of tension and emotion into it even within the confines of the diary format. I've read the first three books of the series following John and his people and liked them, and I very much enjoyed this first book in the Chris family trilogy too. I hope to finish both series before the end of the year or early next year. I will certainly read more by this author.

Read November 2019
4 stars.