The Ashes Series by William W. Johnstone

William W. Johnstone has long been a mainstay of the men’s adventure series business with dozens of volumes available in a range of different types of story from traditional western adventure like The Last Gunfighter and The Mountain Man to post-apocalyptic military action like the Ashes series.

What would happen to American society if the social divisiveness of contemporary political factions ran amok in tandem with the destructive instincts of international terrorists, and all of this was accompanied by the outbreak of a devastating biological plague claiming tens of millions? One possible answer is embodied in the more than 30 adventure volumes comprising the Ashes series.

Take one jaded, angry author—a retired soldier—on the outs with the government for his frankly critical, political commentary-laden series of bestselling adventure novels. Throw in a plot to subvert the American political system from within. Add a devastating, nearly untreatable disease that spreads easily and kills quickly and widely. Top off with a grab- bag of bikers, isolationists, separatist militias and opportunistic terrorist invaders. What you’ve got is a recipe for world-scale disaster, chaos and the collapse of civilization—and, fortunately, one man with the vision and the will to put together a team, an army, a new country, that can put everything back together, only better than before.

But it won’t be easy. Too many people thrive on the chaos and don’t want peace and prosperity to return to upset their own private arrangements and their raping, pillaging, murdering way of life.

Ben Raines is not happy with the world as he sees it and with the way he thinks it could be going, but he’s retired from public service (the military and a subsequent stint as a mercenary) and making a good living as a popular (but not to everybody) novelist. When the world collapses around him, friends and lovers die and neither the government nor anyone else seems to be able to do anything other than add to the chaos. He decides that the only thing to do is get together some old friends and allies, band into an independent army and implement all his Utopian daydreams to make his new world the better place he always thought the old one should be.

Starting with Out of the Ashes then Fire in the Ashes and on through another two dozen plus titles all the way to Escape from the Ashes (the last volume in the series), we follow the adventures and challenges as Ben and his army face thugs, mutants, alien invaders and everything else the world can throw at him. As a special bonus you can also take a look at From The Ashes: America Reborn, a final coda and look back at the adventures of Ben Raines.

So check out the first book in the series, Out of the Ashes, and Johnstone's biography page with all of the Johnstone titles that E-Reads currently publishes.

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