Book review: "The Curse", by Mark Gillespie

Before we begin with the review, I want to point out that the book ARC was delivered to me by author himself in change of a honest review.

Now,  I have to say that this book was a huge suprise for me, and I'm sure it will be for every fan of  these type of fiction and for those who are looking for new stories if they give this story a chance. Why I say it is a surprise? , what's so new in a story of a young girl who lives in New York city's ruins? To begin with, the plot is very well posed; not everyday you find a book where, in extensive details, the postapocalyptic scenario where the mankind was on the verge of the extinction thanks to a purely human event. But more than a good plot, this book has plot twists frankly unexpected, what gives to the reading  a huge dinamism, maybe more of the expected on a literary genre so experimental like the posyapocalyptical thriller.

And we must point out that the surprise element is, with no doubt, a literary resource that can give you a good taste if you handle it well.

We can find great example of plot twist with a surprise element on the revelations related to the curse of the death by orgasm; at the beginning of the book  one as a reader begins to draw quick conclusions after reading that the man who was with Helen of Troy cried out in terrible agony. The apparently obvious conclusion is that the "curse", as the group of women who live in New York known as the Complex calls it, is actually a virus in the air that affects the population by preventing them from reproducing. A virus that someone probably invented to reduce the world population and released it somewhere in the world. However, when we are about to finish the  story, we discover that this deadly curse was not a virus, but something purely human motivated by a feeling of resentment (very cleverly) disguised  of responsibility towards the construction of a new mankind.

And what a better way to rebuilt the mankind than fighting the curse of the old world, the world that condemned mankind to live an End War which consequences are the predation, the hate and the nostalgia for everything that was had and didn't know to appreciate it. Talking about wars that extinct mankind, what caused the End War?, or well, what was the End War? I have the hope and the curiosity that these and other doubts will be answered on the next books. I bet that the End War was a nuclear war; I say this because there are some scenes at the end of the book that seemed to indicate that event was what extinguished a  large percentage of the mankind.

However, we better wait and see what Gillespie has reserved to us, his readers, on the second (or on the third) book.