The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books on May 25, 2021

The Apocalypse Seven is a light, moderately clever take on post-apocalypse fiction combined with a mystery. The story imagines that seven characters wake up and notice an accumulation of strange things as they go about their business. At first, they notice the absence of traffic sounds. When they go outside, they notice the absence of other people. And then they notice that things have changed. There are deer roaming in the city. Grass hasn’t been mowed; lawns have gone wild. Electricity isn’t working. Batteries are dead. An occasional building has disappeared or been replaced with a different building. Toward evening, they notice the wolves, which turn out to be coyotes bred with dogs. And eventually they notice that the weather is strange.

As the title implies, the seven characters eventually come together. Five of them wake up in Boston or Cambridge. One is a woman in the nearby countryside whose horse has disappeared. The seventh is a preacher in New Hampshire. One of the women who work up near Harvard is blind; her dog is gone. The fact that they all find each other so easily is difficult to believe, but the reader will need to suspend belief repeatedly to enjoy the novel.

Given the evident changes in their environment, it will be obvious to the reader that some time passed while the characters were sleeping. It takes the characters a surprisingly long time to work that out. It also takes surprisingly long before they realize that they each have a different understanding of what year it was when they went to sleep. The characters are more focused on speculating about the reason everyone else has disappeared — they decide to call it the whateverpocalypse — and wondering whether they should be searching for other survivors.

Much of the novel is spent exploring each character’s reaction to the need for immediate survival. A 14-year-old girl contributes her lock picking skills. A woman from MIT is good with stars and calculating the passage of time. The preacher is good with a gun and the horse woman — who finds and tames a wild horse — is good with a bow. The blind woman is good at taming wolves. The other two guys aren’t terribly useful but they supply manual labor and moral support. Working together and helping each other, they manage to survive some mildly harrowing experiences. At some point a new kid makes a brief and babbling appearance, but he doesn’t last long.

The mystery, of course, is the cause of the whateverpocalypse. Contributing to the mystery are some sparkling lights that appear at seemingly random intervals, sometimes taking vaguely humanoid shapes and other times just spinning around like disco balls. Then there’s a white tube with a cap sticking out of the ground, constructed of an unknown material, that seems to have some significance to the sparkling lights. Finally, there’s something like a ghost with body odor who occasionally appears and speaks to the characters, unless they are imagining him.

I won’t give away the answer to the mystery but I will say that Gene Doucette supplies one. It even makes some superficial sense if you don’t try to pick it apart. I’m not sure that everything in the story makes sense, nor am I sure that every event that deserves a credible explanation receives one, but the plot is really just a vehicle for the characters to interact with each other as the pursue their post-apocalyptic survival adventures.

The characters are all remarkably cooperative and relatively drama-free. That makes them likable, but it diminishes the story’s dramatic tension and makes the characters a bit dull. But the book is a light and easy read and the nature of the apocalypse and the sparkling lights and the malodorous apparition is all fun to ponder for as long as it takes to finish reading the novel. This isn’t the kind of book a reader is likely to think about after finishing it, but it makes a good beach read.

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