Book Review: OUT OF THE RUINS

by | May 17, 2025 | Book Reviews, Reviews, The Horror Review News | 0 comments

Out of the Ruins: The Apocalyptic Anthology
Preston Grassman, ed.
Titan Books (September 7, 2021)
Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy

I’d like to say I’d never lived through an apocalypse of sorts and this book is just science fiction, but since Covid in 2020, it’s become a reality. Maybe, before 2020 I would have read these stories as tales of a distance future, but now they burn bright with a hot fervency. They ask the many What Ifs swirling around in the dark when I lay my head down on the pillow each night to sleep.

Each author brings their dystopian nightmare to the pages, but three stuck with me and it’s been a week since I finished reading. The first was “The Rise and Fall of Whistle-Pig City” by Paul Di Filippo when the triteness of creation and existence is really pounded home by the last surrounding creatures who decided to create a city for their sheet amusement, which got me thinking this is how we could have all been created. The second story was “The Endless Fall” by Jeffrey Thomas, a disturbing freefall throughout time and without end after a crash goes bad from a landing gear on a planet, and the third is “How the Monsters Found God” by John Skipp and Autumn Christian, which is the story holding the most promise for the continuation of some kind of creation, even if it isn’t human.

We humans are fragile things made of blood, bone, and sinew, bound to break down at any time. I think this became self-evident during the beginning of Covid in the mid oughts. I can’t say I wasn’t rooting for apocalypse or salvation at that point, which seems to be a common theme in this collection. I was riding the wave of sickness with a family member working in respiratory therapy and the odds were depressing and I didn’t see much good in humanity left fighting for at times. But we’re here. We’re here. We’re resilient like weeds and I guess we can weather one apocalypse, so maybe we’ll weather another one. It remains to be seen.

About Nora B. Peevy

Nora B. Peevy is a cat trapped in a human’s body. Please send help or tuna. She toils away for JournalStone and Trepidatio Publishing as a submissions reader, is a co-editor for Alien Sun Press, the newest reviewer for Hellnotes, and has been published by Eighth Tower Press, Weird Fiction Quarterly, and other places. Usually, you can find her on Facebook asking for help escaping from her human body or to get tuna. Tuna is nice. Cats like tuna.

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