BOOK REVIEW: ​THE RAMPANT BY JULIE E DAY

Ten Years into ‘The Rapture’ two teens hatch a plan for it to end

The post-apocalyptic world of fiction is a rather crowded one and it is tricky for an author to get their work to stand out from the pack, that is a hard and simply fact. Julie E Day makes a spirited attempt at getting noticed by taking her apocalyptic tale in a slightly different direction; by using Sumerian mythology as the basis of her apocalypse. The story starts ten years into the ‘Sumerian Rapture’; I found this confusing, as the Rapture is traditionally connected to Christian/Biblical prophecy and I have no idea whether it has any bearing on Sumerian mythology.  However, in this version of the story The Rapture has failed to progress, because a deity known as ‘The Rampant’ has gone missing and The Rapture cannot continue without him being where, in prophetic terms, he is supposed to be. This means that for ten years humanity has been surviving, and getting killed off, by the creatures which are now stuck in our world and both walk and hunt amongst us.
 
Confused? I certainly was and struggled to get my head around a story which I found patchy and disjointed, which perhaps attempted to cover too much ground considering it was a novella. There was more than enough going on, potentially, for a much bigger work.  The story is narrated in the first person by Gillian Halkey, who is secretly in love with her best friend, Mel Bareilles, whose father was killed by one of the marauding creatures. The girls believe that they can kick start The Rapture if they find the missing God (or was it a Demigod?) which has been pulling Gillian down to the Netherworld via her dreams, explaining his plan to her in riddles and half-truths. Along the way Mel believes she can discover the missing pieces of her father’s dead body, as only complete corpses can ascend into Heaven. I’m not entire certain that this plot summation is correct as I struggled to follow the clashing Christian and Sumerian mythology and am still confused writing this. Apologies to the author if I am speaking twaddle.
 
I am not sure if it is aimed at a Young Adult (YA) market, but it certainly had a strong whiff of that age range. On one level the story is too confusing for youngsters, but on another the whiny and snarky teenage voice of Gillian may begin to grate for some adult readers.  They may also find the sudden change in the relationship of the two girls from best friends, to something more unrealistic, as it happened way too very quickly and I was unconvinced. On the other hand, Gillian has good cause to be angry with the dangerous God created world she has been living in since she was six when the Old Gods initiated The Rapture. Gillian, and everyone left behind, have spent ten years treading on eggshells, wondering whether today is going to be the last day. This reminded me slightly of the excellent HBO TV show The Leftovers which deals with those left behind after the disappearance of 140 million people, but at least those left behind in the TV show did not have to contend with nasty entities like the Demigods of this book which lurked outside and could mimic human voices.
 
Whether adult readers find Gillian’s slightly annoying (but sometimes quite funny) inner voice to be irritating or not nobody can deny that The Rampant is littered with truly champion sentences. When discussing the safety of going out after dark Gill notes; “As our Sunday School teachers are always telling us, big feelings get in the way of the important stuff, like trying to stay alive.” Or when discussing the death of someone they knew; “Death by minor deity is just a plain bad way to go”. Again, the sort of one-liners you might have expected Buffy to trot out and there lots of them to go around.
 
Set in Decatur, Indiana, the majority of the story revolves around their dangerous journey into the Netherworld, which mirrors any number of similar odysseys from ancient mythology. Armed with equipment lifted from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; “Pastor blessed knife, necessary in Basic Salvation training” they have discovered a way of entering the Netherworld involving lots of precise rules (according to Gilgamesh) to enter, for example, an individual must not wear clean clothes or he must not wear sandals (socks are probably okay). So, the girls wear socks. The book had an eye for minor details which was quirky and along the way the is littered with extracts from various religious documents, such as ‘The Small Catechism’, from the Sumerian Revivalist Church, which both girls belong to.
 
I found that there was a lot of information dumping which made what was quite a short book unwieldly and also broke up the flow. I would have liked to have been provided a more detail picture on how the world had survived for ten years, but this was very sketchily pushed into the background and I appreciate you can only do so much in a short book. When we hit the Netherworld we meet other characters and creatures, including Mel’s dad who is trapped there and eventually The Rampant itself. The Rapture is not covered in fiction very often, so well done to the author for broaching a very tricky subject, if you’re interested in this Katie Coyle wrote a very entertaining YA series which begins with Vivian Versus the Apocalypse and a teenage girl’s family disappears, but she remains. Ouch.
 
The Rampant is a creative and imaginative read and I am sure many readers will get more out of it than I did. Using The Rapture as a plot device was never going to be easy and this novella is worth a look, even if it had me scratching my head in parts.
 
3/5
 
Tony Jones

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