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SUMMARY

Lewis’s life changes forever after waking up one morning to find the world’s population just gone. Stranded without food or water, he’s forced to use ingenuity to survive, foraging resources from the desolate city around him.

Until he discovers he’s not alone.

Lewis is threatened by a violent gang of gun-wielding scavengers led by a deranged madman. He learns these men are harvesting survivors, inflicting slavery and torture for a horrifying purpose. Outmanned and outgunned, Lewis and some newfound friends must band together, employing their collective wit and cunning against a deadly foe to avoid being killed. Or worse… captured.

DEADHEADING is a post-apocalyptic journey of survival, ingenuity, and a dollop of vengeance.

REVIEW

Lewis is an average loner. He’s living a fairly solitary life, hanging out at home, watching television, eating convenience meals and peanut butter cups. But around him, the world begins to change. A sickness permeates the globe and most of humanity dies off as a result.

Somehow, Lewis has survived on his own, unscathed watching it all unfold on television. Until there is no television. Or supermarkets. Or anything else you’d find in a modern civilized city. Including food and water. Lewis finally has to go out to scavenge food and water for himself in order to survive. It’s a difficult situation and potentially lethal.

It gets worse once Lewis finds other survivors. There are gun wielding lunatics who are oppressing other survivors through slavery and torture so they can live a comfortable existence. Lewis has found a way to grow his own food and take care of himself so these other people are a threat to everything Lewis has.

After an encounter with one of these groups, Lewis comes to find there are still some rational people left in the world. Now it’s on Lewis and this group of survivors to defend themselves from the gun toting madmen.

Overall, Deadheading does a good job of portraying what life would likely be like in a city devastated by illness almost to the point of zero population left. The beginning takes a little bit of time to get the story going but once it does there is plenty of action happening. A nice touch is that Lewis does not instantly go from being a couch potato to an action hero. The author, Paul Cristo, shows us how Lewis does his research and learns his way out of situations.

There are a few moments in the book that stretch the imagination a bit, but those are few and far between so they are ultimately forgivable.

If you like post apocalyptic fiction like The Walking Dead, Divergent, or The Hunger Games but without any supernatural elements and a story more grounded in reality, Deadheading is the book for you.