54. The Long and Loud Silence by Wilson Tucker

I've been looking for the Wilson Tucker book Wild Talent for decades now.  It inspired a tabletop RPG (Wild Talents) whose design I quite appreciated and is also considered I believe to be the first or one of the earliest ESP battle type stories.  I have read a few other of his books and never loved them (not terrible just from that period of sci-fi which tends to be too speculative and not enough story for my taste). However, this one I decided to take because it is post-apocalyptic (a sub-genre which used to be my favourite but now I am just more of a completist) and because it's a beautiful Coronet with that sick cover.

I'm glad I did get it because this was an interesting read.  It is marred by the nerdy white male sexual politics of the early 1950s.  Once you filter that out, it is a dark and low-key "realistic" PA tale that is quite cool.  The narrator is almost Parker-like in his absence of emotions.  Corporal Russel Gary, career military man, wakes up after a major drunk on his birthday to find that some enemy had somehow sent bombs that killed most of the people, either through a nuclear blast (the kind that leaves buildings standings) or with disease.  His first encounter is with a teenage girl who is desperately robbing jewelry stores.  This is already where the books sexism really sucks.  I get it that she is a young, teenage girl but it shows she has street smarts.  Why would she only be stealing jewelry?  It's stupid.  We get away from her fairly soon (of course though totally naive and unable to make the most basic survival decisions, she is sexually experienced and "surprises" him at night).  We get a lot of cool exploring where he learns that America is divided between east and west along the Mississippi. The east is contaminated and considered full of spies and traitors.  The Mississippi is guarded all along its banks and all the bridges except a few blown up.

The portrayal of the behaviour of the survivors on the eastern side is weird and not well thought out.  Feels like in Tucker's world there are barely any people and he doesn't explicitly say most of them were killed.  It also seems like they quickly and too easily degenerate into looting mobs and starvation instead of pulling together.  Despite these issues, the interactions with the world is quite cool.  He spends a winter on a Florida beach with another man and woman but leaves when they fall in love.  He becomes a sort of bodyguard for a naive farmer family.  It's cool and readable. As the narrative progresses, he slowly descends further and further into animal survival, in the end living in a cave.  It doesn't really end, except a sort of "romantic" wrap-up to the storyline with the naive teenager.  So while flawed, it was an engaging and unsettling story of a ruined and divided mid-20th century America.