First off, a very brief recap; I very much enjoyed reading The Last Plague. It was a compelling piece of post-apocalyptic fiction, with a nice smattering of cosmic horror. It was bleak, gross and disturbing - though never gratuitously so - and had a nice line of fatal inevitability running through it. I did have a few minor issues with it, namely that the characters all felt interchangeable, and there was the odd awkward sentence here and there. But it was a solid debut and made me curious about what Rich would do next. The question is, does The Last Outpost improve upon its predecessor?

First off, a very brief recap; I very much enjoyed reading The Last Plague. It was a compelling piece of post-apocalyptic fiction, with a nice smattering of cosmic horror. It was bleak, gross and disturbing - though never gratuitously so - and had a nice line of fatal inevitability running through it. I did have a few minor issues with it, namely that the characters all felt interchangeable, and there was the odd awkward sentence here and there. But it was a solid debut and made me curious about what Rich would do next. The question is, does The Last Outpost improve upon its predecessor?

The answer, for me, is a resounding yes, in almost every way imaginable.

The Last Outpost opens with us joining the meandering progress of Royce, a man who wanders the British landscape without purpose, scavenging in the ruins of civilisation and evading the attentions of the ever ravenous infected who now dominate the country. Through him, we see what destruction has been wrought, what violence and death has been visited upon the population. We are his constant companion, feeling his pain, his loneliness, his disorientation as he drifts close to the outskirts of despair and madness. For fully a third of the book we are with him, until he meets another survivor, the elderly George. Their uneasy partnership lasts - with only a few brief encounters with other survivors to varying consequences - until a third person joins them, the heavily pregnant Amy. She tells them of a possible salvation, a survivors' camp located in Denmark. Though it sounds like fantasy, like an impossible hope, together the three of them set off in search of...The Last Outpost.

Sorry, couldn't help myself there. The first thing about this sequel, the most noticeable, is that it is far shorter than the first instalment. At a guess, I'd say it's nearly half the size. Couple that with the reduced number of characters and on the face of it, it would seem like a step back from the previous story, almost a reverse of what you'd normally expect from a series; usually, these things start off small and quiet, then grow more epic as they progress. Here, Rich flips this convention on its head. Yet it works, and I feel this is precisely the intent. By focusing on only a couple of main characters; Royce initially, then George and finally Amy later in the book, we get a much more...intimate view of them, their experiences and the shattered world they now inhabit. It's all about the detail in this one, a very deliberate and meticulous sift through the very human tragedy that happened in a more chaotic and epic style in the first book. And it's incredibly detailed. Let's get this out of the way now; this book is bleak. And it's supposed to be. I mean, who seriously picks up a book about the end of the world as we know it, where mutated people have transformed almost beyond recognition into the kind of creatures that make those from John Carpenter's The Thing look like Sesame Street puppets, and expects it to be...I don't know...jolly? Get real, people. This is the end of all things, this is a world of bloody, tearing violence, of pain and misery; of utter solitude, and tooth and nail survival. It's not meant to be a Sunday afternoon picnic. But I digress...

What Rich has done here, is to take the strongest parts of his debut novel and build on them; the pervasive atmosphere of dread; the inventive and repulsive depictions of the changed, the infected; the sense of destruction and desolation; the attention to detail, managing to show so much with economical sentences; and his exceptional ability to make you squirm with graphic - yet never gratuitous - wince-inducing scenes of violence. We see this ruined world through Royce's eyes, as he wanders the aftermath, picking through the leftovers from when life was 'normal'. This is a world where the plague has won, a land where the infected rule, wandering a country bereft of almost any other human life. The rare people that Royce does encounter are desperate scavengers themselves that he tends to avoid, only forming an uneasy alliance with George towards the end of the first third; a partnership that is as much hassle as not. But prior to this, we are solely with Royce, seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels. And very little of it is pleasant. I say this as a caveat, in that there is a heavy shroud of melancholy and darkness weighing heavy on this story. As I said before, it's meant to be like this; it shows us the sad relics of those who have either died or been changed. Rich manages to accomplish this, as he has done in previous stories, with just a few well-chosen words, with precise phrasing. But it's not all bleak and miserable. There are also some wonderfully sad bittersweet scenes which tug at the heart-strings; one, in particular, shows Royce as he finds a laptop with a full battery belonging to a young teenage girl (whose fate we do not know, but can imagine). On this, he watches films from a time before the world ended and it's such a controlled and emotional piece of work, that it had me choked up.

But of course, this is a book that's as much about the infected/invasion as it is about the people who are eking out the barest of existence, and it's a testament to Rich's skill that he never lets you forget the type of awful world you're now in. Though the instances of ravaging violence are considerably sporadic, when they do come, they are nothing short of terrifying. I've found over the years that very few writers are really capable of affecting me in such a way that I feel simultaneously disturbed and nauseous - though it's as much an emotional nausea as it is physical. Joe D'Lacey managed it for me in a memorable scene in Garbage Man, Michael Marshall Smith did it with mounting dread in his short story More Tomorrow, and more recently, the short story Hunting by Rachel Halsall, in the anthology Wild Things had a scene or two that caused me to squirm (and full review coming in the next week or so...). And one of my formative introductions to horror reading was Graham Masterton, who had me feeling ill over and over, particularly in the opening scenes of Death Trance. Rich is another one of those writers who manages it almost without any effort; a few well placed words here, a clearly depicted scene of excruciating violence here, and I'm suddenly reading the book with my eyes squinted. And it's never gratuitous; it always serves the story and the very fact of its rarity gives it all the more impact. For the rest of the story, the infected are relegated to stalkers in the shadows, haunting the sidelines of the story, harrying our protagonists as they try desperately to move through the wreckage of civilisation. We also get more of a glimpse into what these creatures may be - beyond mutated humans. Though much of this is still shrouded in mystery, the cosmic horror comes to the fore in a number of scenes, and in one particularly epic and awe-inspiring set-piece.

If it sounds like I'm overselling this book, it's because I was completely enthralled by it. It sees Rich take huge leaps forward with all aspects of his writing and story-telling, and those weren't low talents in the first place, by any means. In particular, he has developed his ability to create memorable and individual characters, who all sound and act different from each other. It's adds more depth to an already powerful piece of work and where The Last Plague has been nominated for best novel in the BFS awards, The Last Outpost is a story truly deserving of such an accolade. If it doesn't follow its predecessor into at least the nomination stages next year, I'll be completely astonished. It is literary, deeply emotional, bleak and cold, and muscles along with real focus and power until its dark and uncompromising end.

Seriously; if you consider yourself in any way a serious reader of dark, unrelenting, depressing - yes, depressing and I don't see that as a bad thing - apocalyptic cosmic horror, you really ought to be making yourself aware of this writer. I, for one, am glad to count him as a friend, and I'm grateful and privileged to see him deservedly rise through the ranks of our current writers of serious horror. I'm very much looking forward to the third, and concluding, volume in this series.

Our interview with Rich can be found here 

Purchase a copy here 

I must make use of my rare disclaimer. I did this on my review of Rich Hawkins's The Last Plague, and I've done it on my review of Kit Power's GodBomb! The reason for this is because I feel that there are people  - a tiny number perhaps, but you never know - who will assume that because you know the author...are, in fact, good friends with them...that your review will somehow be compromised, biased. Well, I just want to point out - again - that no matter who or what I'm reviewing, I will always offer my honest opinion about what I'm reading. I see no point in doing otherwise. I see no gain in putting your name to something that is sub-standard - in fact, when I see this in practice, it leads me to lose any faith I have in the person doing it - or, conversely, in speaking negatively of something good simply because I may not like the author in question. I'm an adult, I'm pretty adept at separating my personal feelings about a person where their work is concerned and if I can't, I simply won't read their stuff. Simple.

So yes, I know Rich and count him as a friend, but this will have no bearing at all on the  review of The Last Outpost.