Revelation According to William Johnstone

Doomsday stories are among humankind's oldest, and for those of us who toss at night contemplating war, famine, plague, terrorism and a host of worst case scenarios, there is a body of apocalyptic literature guaranteed to extend insomnia far into the bright glare of daytime. You don't have to be a Freudian psychologist to grasp that there is a pleasure principle underlying the terror we get reading books designed to scare us witless. Is it the joy of knowing the horror is not happening to us? I don't think so. If the book is good, the horror is happening to us!

The last five or six decades have refined apocalyptic literature to a form of high art. After reading On the Beach, Nevil Shute's prediction of a devastated post-nuclear planet, I was traumatized for months. (Of course, given the state of nuclear rearmament and proliferation now, things are actually worse today than ever.) We have seen nuclear holocaust novels, environmental disaster novels, religious apocalypse novels, dystopian novels, and every other kind of novel informing us that the end of life as we know it is but moments away.

William Johnstone's Ashes novels are among the most realistic and disturbing of them, and because the series extends to some thirty volumes, you need not concern yourself about running out of stimuli to rob you of a good night's sleep. Does that give you pleasure, as Dr. Freud says it will? That's for you to say. But it does give E-Reads great pleasure to offer the complete series to you. The link above will take you to the first volume and clicking on the author's name will take you to a listing of all the Johnstone books available on E-Reads.

- Richard Curtis