Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse Review

Today I’m going to review Survivors by James Wesley Rawles. If you’re thinkging about reading the book don’t! Do not read this book. It’s a huge waste of time and money. I’ll go in depth on why you shouldn’t read it and what if anything was good. Don’t read it though.

I should preface this review with I do respect the work James Rawles has done in the preparedness community with his blog Survivalblog and his other books. I read and for the most part enjoyed Patriots which was set during the same events in this book. If you said you were going to pick up Patriots I couldn’t fault you. So no disrespect with towards Rawles only distaste for the book Survivors.

The book takes place in world where the global economy and more so the American suffers a total collapse. Large scale rioting, power grids off, roving gangs. Basically THE SHIT HAS HIT THE FAN. The story shows how several people manage to survive in this chaotic world. Although the story bounces around it primarily centers on Andy Lane a recently retired army officer trying to get back home to his fiance.

I tended to enjoy the Andy parts of the story more than most and felt that his character was the most developed. A few other characters had flashback scenes to attempt to build them as characters. I felt that these scenes were forced and not relevant to the story. I had a hard time telling one character apart from each other. They all acted and spoke the same. It was basically one character used over and over again. I know Rawles is using this book and the characters as a tool to teach survival skills, but not every thinks and talks exactly the same.THere should have been less characters to more fully focus on a few and develop them.

The book was filled with too many facts that are brought up for almost no reason. I’ve heard the book described as a survival manual in a novel disguise and that’s pretty accurate. The useless facts drag on and on. Techniques can be described without monotonous detail. All survival knowledge does not need to be crammed into a fiction novel. More attention should have been focuesed on the characters and how they were dealing with the situation than specific model numbers of things.

I have a huge problem with Rawles going way out of his way to not use “cuss” words. He has made up substitutes like his using “Schumer” in place of Shit. At one point Andy break his leg and screams “Hoover damn”…Hoover damn. NO ONE SAYS THAT! I can understand not wanting to use bad language personally. But it exists and people use it.  to try to hold a diverse group of characters to a 1950’s boy scout standard is ridiculous. While cussing is prohibited the word “Fag” seems to be perfectly OK to use. Murder is OK as well. Don’t swear but killing two guys without provocation is ok. They had tattoos though and only bad guys have tattoos…

My other big problem with the book is I felt like Rawles is forcing his religious views on me constantly. I understand that he is a very religious person. Also so are all his characters. All the same religion and extremely devout. Too me though it was too much and was a distraction from the book. I got the point where I would skip whole paragraphs and sometimes pages to get back to the story.

Finishing this book was hard. TO be honest if I had not planned to review it I would have stopped and never looked back. It was so badly written I did not learn anything. Rawles needs to seriously work on his plot and character development. I’m not sure if I will ever read another book by him again. It seems like his writing is getting worse. I have read Patriots a few times. It had its issues but was a good read with some good information. I can not strongly discourage anyone from reading this book. Please do not throw away your hard earned money and precious time on Survivors.