Jabberwocky Reviews

16. What Comes After by KingEmpo

@KingEmpo, What Comes After

"[Wattys 2021 Shortlisted]

[Wattpad Editor's Pick]

[Featured on Wattpad's Fresh Reads List]

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When an asteroid crashes into the moon and pushes it closer to the Earth, Neal and his family must fight for survival, as tidal tsunamis ravage their coastline and volcanic ash shrouds the sun.

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Trapped between the stresses of high school life and his fear of upcoming college, Neal feels smothered by the overwhelming amount of change and responsibility he is going to face in the future. However, all of this changes when an asteroid crashes into the moon, pushing it much closer to Earth than anticipated, leading to catastrophic disaster to his large coastal town as the power shuts down and the tidal tsunamis ravage their coastline.

Inspired by "Life As We Knew It", the source series for this novel, it is written in a hybrid-diary format, chronicling the fears and emotions of Neal as he and his family struggle to survive in this changed world. Each day is a struggle as the world falls further and further in decay as volcanic eruptions cloud the skies and the waves eat away at the land. No one thinks of the past anymore. The only thought on everyone's mind is about what comes after.

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No Fandom Knowledge Needed

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Featured on Wattpad's Fresh Reads List

Featured on YA's Interstellar Reading List

Featured on Stories Undiscovered Reading List for December 2021

Featured on TeenFiction's Between Worlds Reading List

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2nd Place Winner in the Summer Zodiac Awards.

2nd Place Winner in the Summer Smoothie Awards

3rd Place Winner in the Hidden Gems Awards.

3rd Place Winner in the Sunflower Awards.

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Right off the bat, I think you have a solid blurb. I don't know what your logline is doing there, coming along for the ride, but your blurb clearly explains the premise and some theme. One minor nitpick I have is that when you say "all of this changes," I read it at first as implying that Neal isn't going to be facing responsibilities and changes in the future, but obviously that's going to be even more true given the asteroid collision. I'd consider finding some way to clarify that it's the nature of his struggle which changes.

I like how you slowly build up the Mooncrash in the first chapter as the backdrop to the high school drama, although I feel like this tension is undercut by the fact we already know from the blurb something is going to go wrong—a more cynical reader might even question the exact physics of the event, or how come nobody was able to predict that the collision wouldn't have any side-effects, but it's a necessary contrivance for the plot and I'm not a physicist. Overall, I think this first chapter is executed well.

It's interesting reading this book in the context of COVID and the other calamities we've been faced with as a planet because I'm more inclined to compare our real experiences to fiction. Going into the second chapter, one thing I notice is how nonchalant Neal is about the tragedy, and while I don't think this is necessarily a bad character direction, to me it's also a side-effect of having to balance keeping the reader informed about the general plot while still telling a first-person story. We spend a lot of time here listing the exact sorts of groceries we're looking for, but this is something I feel the reader already "knows," in a sense: we've all seen a lot of disaster movies, and the real appeal of this story I think you want to showcase isn't the actual disaster itself, but Neal's character development. And I think the story strengthens again when we get to the third chapter and it's, ironically enough, the less active sections with Neal just sitting around and telling us how bored he is. That's because it feels less like a laundry list of elements to make the scenario plausible and more like you're telling us a 3D narrative.

My thought going past the 25% threshold is that while I think you've picked a strong narrative style for the story you want to tell, there's nothing that changes this story from being, at its core, "I ate some beets. Things got worse. Maybe they'll get better." repeated endlessly—in a way, I think the story you want to tell might be better told as a short story. Some of it comes from when you have a plot where you have a handful of characters all stuck in the same place for perpetuity, there are only so many permutations you can have. And since it's not like you can kill off a character or say "haha, it was all a dream!," you have to pad it out a bit. Maybe it's just because I'm reading this all in one sitting that it feels like it builds a bit too much: you do an effective job of transporting me to what it's like to live in a post-apocalyptic setting, but do I really want to feel like I'm there? Obviously there's still plot, and character development, and all that, but we still feel trapped in the cycle.

I think your character development is very strong: Charles, Leon, and so on all have their quirks—and I mean that in a good way. In general, there are a lot of small details that do land, and the deeper in I go the more I think I'm accepting the dreary bildungsroman vibes for what they are—the Gatsby joke about the Valley of Ashes made me chuckle. I also especially like the slow ethical decline we see, or the erosion of standards, with things like the theft of the ax and solar panels, because these elements give more of a thematic purpose. With a story like this one, you want those thematic elements to come true, and I still feel like they're bogged down at times by that endless cycle of "and then things got slightly worse"—even three-quarters of the way through the book, I don't feel like I've reached a significantly higher level of enlightenment than I have at the start, just because everything continues to loop back on itself.

Now, of course as I write this, things proceed to get worse (I hope you appreciate how I'm live-journaling this review to match your book—I might keep doing this for other books), but the impact is dulled because we've already had so many chapters of things getting worse that another loss of food suddenly doesn't feel like such a huge deal. And on one hand that has a nice thematic ring to it, but on the other hand, like I said earlier you want your readers alert enough to feel it in their bones. I know this review is pretty short, but there's not too much I need to comment on: your prose is strong, although while this isn't necessarily a prose thing, some of your chapters could be split up a bit more—they just feel long.

I think the ending was strong. I'm not going to spoil it. But I think by the end of the story, you were able to wrap up the loose ends I feel like you needed to do, and give a bit more of that oomph you needed. I just felt it wasn't carried enough by the beginning and middle, but I'm not sure how to best fix the issue. Your book reminded me a lot of the first book I read, and I'd say it has the closest feel to that out of all the books I've read, but what the difference there was to me was that while we still had those hard-hitting ideas at the end to really tie things up, there was a lot more throughout the book that kept things going, that made themes build. They magnified the effect, and most of all had variety: I wouldn't say it was much more "active" of a story than yours, but it didn't feel like we were running in circles. I'm going to give you a strong 85/100, and I'd say this is the second-strongest story I've read so far. Actually, I haven't been splitting rankings, but let's make it an 87/100. A B+.