HOME BEYOND HELL by Karen Yakey is a peculiar cross of apocalyptic science fiction and romance. Forty years hence, the European Union has split apart, China has undergone an economic collapse, and isolationism is in vogue across the globe. Vanessa Brouwer finds herself holed up in an old Dutch fort, which is promptly taken over by the masked ex-US Army captain Ethan Evans, ex-SAS man Morgan Winchester, and their group of misfit soldiers. The plot revolves around the two men, their shadowy reasons for taking over the compound in which Vanessa lives, what they shall do next – and their visceral attraction toward Vanessa.

The world-building is less important to the story than the emphasis on character, dialog, and spectacle, with the occasional dash of low comedy thrown in. It’s heady stuff, with longing looks, steamy clinches, and more than a bit of fantasizing on the part of all three main characters. There are also a few grim episodes of violence – Ethan, and to a lesser extent Morgan, are desperate men. They are also cloyingly stereotypical. Ethan is a manifestation of the stock excitable Celtic character with a chip on his shoulder. A Welshman by birth, he hates the English, has a temper, is servile towards royals, is a borderline alcoholic, and has a predilection for the lyrical. His banter with stuck-up Englishman Morgan – with whom he competes for Vanessa’s attentions, and whose own verbose mode of speech would seem out of place at Downton Abbey – is ridden with cliches best left in the twentieth century, along with How Green Was My Valley and the works of sodden Dylan Thomas knock-offs. Irish and Scottish characters, their dialog replete with Jaysuses and dinnae kens, offer more of the same. More rounded characters would benefit the work as a whole.

Some strange decisions were also made concerning Ethan’s backstory, which at length stands as a barrier to his likeability. As we learn later in the book, he perpetrated a war crime in Ukraine – “the destruction of [a] Ukrainian community” – that led the Ukrainians who witnessed it to pursue him with the intention of exacting revenge. In light of the most destructive and vicious war to hit Europe in eighty years, one that has produced a refugee crisis that to date has displaced somewhere in the region of eight million of their population, it seems at best an exceptionally indelicate gambit. Ethan is hardly a straightforwardly good guy even before this revelation comes our way, and his remorse does little to make him relatable thereafter. Once disbelief is suspended however, HOME BEYOND HELL is a wickedly good read; at times it even approaches the campy in the best possible way. But it is also uneven in its characterization, and a little less reliance on stereotype will make subsequent entries in the series far more satisfying.

A love triangle set in a dystopian near future, Karen Yakey’s HOME BEYOND HELL offers lurid fun, but suffers from stereotypical characterization.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader