When I read a story, I don’t care about the small stuff.
Personally, I don’t care if the hero and the heroine end up together or if they’re
forever kept apart. I don’t care if a couple characters in an isolated
situation live or die. What I want is the big picture: what is the government
doing? What’s going on at a global level? If the conflict of a story affects
less than, say, fifty people, I’m normally not that interested.
A lot of people feel exactly the opposite; they’d rather
read about a couple characters struggling for happiness than a whole world on
the brink of disaster. That’s great. I love how everyone has different tastes.
But for myself, while I love well-crafted characters, what I want from a story
is a mass conflict.
This is why I dislike post apocalyptic stories. Because
they promise me a global plot (after all, a catastrophe has just occurred which
could destroy the entire earth) and what they deliver is a usually the story of
just a couple characters trying to survive.
Take Dark Inside
by Jeyn Roberts. It’s by far my favourite post apocalyptic novel because the
characters are so well crafted, but the story was just about the four
characters surviving. Same with The
Forest of Hands and Teeth, which centers on a girl leaving her insular
community and venturing into a world of zombies. Same with Life as We Knew It, which concentrates on a single family coping
after the moon crashes into the earth. The
Eleventh Plague is a little broader, but still stays within one community.
Right now I’m reading Ashfall, and
that’s just about one boy trying to find his family. Basically, all of these
novels are about a single individual/family/community coping with a global
catastrophe.
I hate to say it, but I found most of these novels
somewhat boring. My mind automatically goes to the big picture. How can the
world be saved? If thousands of people are dying, why should I care about one
character? Why am I reading about someone nearly starving in a shed when I
could be reading about the people trying to save millions?
In this way, post apocalyptic novels infuriate me. The
point of the story is so small, basically on the individual level, when I
personally feel like it should be so much bigger, on a global level. I can
handle reading a romance novel occasionally because there’s no bigger conflict
looming on the horizon; it’s all light reading. But when there’s a huge
catastrophe, I want to be reading about the people solving that, not the
individuals slogging around trying to find food.
I have to add: what I’ve said here is completely personal taste. Every single
one of the books listed above has plenty of fantastic reviews on Goodreads. Obviously,
some people like it when their books follow just a couple characters rather
than looking at the big picture. However, that’s not for me. For now, I’m done
with anything calling itself post apocalyptic that concentrates on a single
character. It’s just not my thing.
Now… over to you! I’m curious, which sort of reader are
you? Do you want the big picture, or would you rather focus on just a couple
characters? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
