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“The world was nothing like it had been yesterday.”

Author: Tim Lebbon

There is one family with the power to make rain. It used to be a gentle gift, a good gift. They would build their machines, stick the needles into their arms, and go to another place, a shoreline, and from this alien world call rain into ours. But for every generation the shoreline has morphed, becoming more ominous. Then Jesse used his power to call down rain in a stunted field and accidentally brought death and disaster.

Jesse never made rain again, but he couldn’t let go of his apparatus, and when his daughter started compulsively building her own, he knew that the gift turned curse was infecting the new generation. Her shoreline was worse, her power greater. Jesse tried to stop her when the creatures first started raining down. Instead, he killed her. Or so he thought. But she lived, maddened and more determined than ever. Now, she is building again, trying to bring the storms to a famished land.

I was drawn to The Last Storm by the blend of post-apocalyptic lands and supernatural horrors. The idea of rains brought from alien worlds and creatures coming in those blood rains, drenching a barren world that is slowly dying, is both evocative and totally terrifying. But first, it begins with alternating chapters, setting the stage for madness. It’s awhile before we get the true scope of horror, and, instead, we have a semi-Western world of hardened desert people, carrying guns and strutting through burned towns, towers of fire ravaging the baked earth in the distances.

It’s not clear why the world is undergoing these continual draughts, although there is a hint that it is somehow tied into the degradation of the rainmakers’ supernatural shores. These hints are never fleshed out and, honestly, they should be. The devolution of the rainmakers’ gift into a curse, the progression that seems to reflect the destruction of the waking world around them, isn’t essential to our enjoyment of the story, per say, but it is essential to our understanding. This is an imperfection in the narrative, which takes so much for granted and puts us into a burnt out, rainless United States without a true explanation. Sadly, this is a post-apocalyptic genre problem.

Image by Stanley QUAH from Pixabay

What does work though is the characterization, although I admit I didn’t care for the slow build at first. I’m not a Western type girlie, and the landscape of the desert is distinctly Wild West, dashed together with some hypermodern (electric cars have been much further developed here, and they get stolen a lot). But slowly, the characters grew on me, and I got involved with the story. By the time I was fully enmeshed, the supernatural horror was ready to flood the narrative, and it hit so much harder.

We have Jesse, the guilt-ridden father who has hidden away from the world. Ash, the insane daughter driven by her addiction to rainmaking and broken by the injection that nearly killed her. Karina, the mother who never stopped looking. And Cee, an addict who comes into Ash’s life and sees her vision. We also have a villain, Jimi, whose inclusion in the story increases the tragedy at the end and leads to an unforgettable showdown.

Now, that showdown isn’t perfect, and Ash’s transition is completely inexplicable (insane to bizarrely sane), but it delivers some of the best horror imagery and it is not light on the destruction. Be careful who you root for in this narrative, because they may not survive, and their deaths may be epically harrowing and vividly gruesome.

In the end, I had to just keep reading, letting the full horror of the final rain fall around me, my mind caught between that shore with its oily ocean and a rain of blood and creatures in a desperate desert town. It was an epic journey, and while not everything was explained, I was still engaged enough by the imaginative nature and the characters to thoroughly enjoy the ride. Recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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