Title: Homeless
Author: Neil Shooter
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication Date: November 9, 2013
Genres: Science Fiction
Length: 15 pages
Source: I received a free copy from the author.
Rating: 3 Stars
Blurb:
Winter didn’t end, but his world has. Is he completely alone? In a world gone cold, what can keep the spark of life shining?
Content Warning: Animal attack. Murder. A character who eats a dead, raw rat. Possible mental health problems depending on how one interprets certain scenes.
Review:
Sometimes the world ends with a whisper, not a bang.
The first half of this tale was an excellent example of what the post-apocalyptic genre can be like. The unnamed protagonist has somehow survived a catastrophe that killed the vast majority of humans and should have killed him, too. His limited information about what happened only made his struggle to survive even more poignant as I had no idea what else might await him after the months of hardship he had already endured. I loved the fact that the reader was limited to what this character knew about the world and could only make rough guesses about the things he had yet to discover.
Unfortunately, I struggled with the second half of this tale due to how unbelievable I found certain scenes. Their themes were so exaggerated when compared to what happened earlier that I kept wondering if there was a piece of the puzzle I was missing. Was the narrator holding something back from the audience? Was he unaware of an important detail that would make later scenes feel more logical? There were answers to these questions that I thought made sense, but I kept wishing that Mr. Shooter would give us a few more hints about which direction he intended his audience to go.
With that being said, my ultimate conclusion about what happened was an interesting one and did help me to find some closure for this character. Whether or not it was what the author intended, it made sense given what I knew about the protagonist early on as well as some of the clues about his personality that were revealed later on. If my interpretation was correct, this was a more realistic assessment of what this catastrophe would actually be like for the surivors than many books in this genre tend to create.
Homeless was a wild ride.