James Jaros

Okay, at first I thought this book had potential. Emmy-winning author. Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopian. I dig it. My kind of thing. Promising beginning. Lots of violence. I can deal with that. But then some creepy things start, well, creeping into the book. First, it’s the Wicca virus (nice title, eh?), where it’s spread by sexual transmission, but then eventually pretty much everyone is infected or a carrier – except young girls who have not yet menstruated, and they are not infected for one year, 365 days, after they first begin to do so, at which point they become infected and for all intents and purposes, become disposable. Which means, they’re the only females on earth that horny men can safely have sex with – 11 and 12 year old girls. Think about that for a minute. Then start thinking about the premise of this book. Yeah.

So, marauders go out to attack different camps, violently, and steal their young girls, and in this southern region based in old Knoxville, take them back to a freakish religious cult called the Army of God, which is armed, powerful, and made up of pedophiliac killers. This happens to a woman named Jessie, whose young daughter is stolen in a raid that kills over 100 of her colleagues. She and her daughter, Bliss, start out tracking this group, just the two of them, against well armed marauders, but they end up joining forces with some other people in their situation and start looking for this fortress.

The things that started disturbing me about this book, though, were the descriptions of the young girls and their bodies and what the dirty old men did to them. Vivid descriptions. Jessie’s daughter, Ananda, lived in fear of getting her first period because then she would be married off to a dirty old man, get impregnated immediately, hopefully give birth to a female child, that they could bring up for more sexual slavery – a boy child would be sold off – and after 365 days, she would disappear, permanently. It happens to all of the girls. There is torture. If you talk back, they wash you eyes out with lye to blind you to teach you a lesson. If you are too resistant, they say you’re in league with the devil, maybe even a witch, and burn you alive at the stake and make all of the girls watch.

Meanwhile, all of the girls have to strip, be washed, especially between their legs and buttocks, cleaned, changed. Ananda is forced to live with the fortress leader and his Nazi-like female companion, sleeping on the floor outside their door. He makes her take her top off and get a doll and practice nursing with it, so he can see her “light colored” nipples, multiple times. We’re given multiple descriptions of her pubic hair, size, shape, thickness. We see other naked young girls through her eyes. What this book eventually, sneakily becomes is not a dystopian sci fi novel, but child porn mixed in with some child torture – kiddie porn. It’s fucking disgusting. I have no idea if this is even legal. I guess if you can sell de Sade, you can sell this, but it’s beyond me why you would market child porn as sci fi and expect people to be okay with this. I found it disturbing, disgusting, repulsive, and appalling, and while part of me admired his writing skills, cause Jaros is a good writer, I was far more put off with the subject material and felt dirty after reading passages of this book. I’ve actually read worse, like when I read The Turner Diaries, but this isn’t a controversial underground white supremacist novel that inspired the greatest act of domestic terrorism in American history. This atrocity is on any sci fi bookshelf in America and that’s disturbing to me. Any 12-year-old kid could pick this up – and be scarred by it. As a writer myself, I’ve never advocated censorship and I’m still not sure I do, but this book belongs on the top shelf, or on its own shelf, or in a glass case – I’m not sure what the answer is, but it’s R to X rated and I don’t think 10 and 12 year old kids should be reading it unsupervised.

This book had a lot of potential and part of me is sorry I’m not going to find out what happens to the family, but I’m not going to subject myself to more and more child torture and child porn to find out. I’m not willing to sell my soul for so little in return. Even though the subject matter merits one star, the writing and originality of the book merits more, so I’m giving it two stars, reluctantly, with the provision that caution should be exercised by any and all who read it, knowing its subject matter is controversial. Therefore, two stars and not recommended.… (más)

In Burn Down the Sky, James Jaros creates a horrifyingly real dystopia in which humanity’s worst nightmares have come true. Nature as we know it has been destroyed, to the point where those whose ancestors denied climate change are subjects of persecution. Weather patterns around the world have gone wild, and rain is a rare occurrence. A deadly STD virus has made sex deadly, leading to madness and suicide. Sex is only safe with a young girl within a year after she begins menstruation. These young girls are “harvested” by a few small powerful groups who, of course, use them to perpetuate their own gene pool.

Each chapter begins with headlines from news of a ruined planet, which are amazingly still functioning. They report widespread water riots, cannibalism and nuclear attacks, as nations and individuals compete for the dwindling resources.

In the midst of the chaos, Jessie, whose daughter Ananda has been kidnapped by marauders along with three other young girls from their encampment in a depression that was once a lake, sets out across the desert in search of the girls. She is accompanied by her older daughter Bliss and a former nurse who had escaped the marauders herself. They must evade these men and other threats to find the girls and rescue them from the stronghold of a group that calls itself “The Army of God” who will use the girls to procreate.

This book is extreme hyperbole, but hyperbole with a purpose. It touches the reality of our own world enough to evoke a deep sense of sadness. It is a warning, and not easy reading. The characters speak of “box stores,” and how they “killed us in the end.”

I am enough of an optimist to believe that we humans will ultimately have enough compassion for each other to prevent the horrible disaster that James Jaros describes so vividly. I don’t believe I would have found this novel so disturbing if it were not so well-done.… (más)

Burn Down the Sky
James Jaros*
Harper Voyager
2011
Mass Market Paperback
336 pages
Advance Uncorrected Proof

A recent incident has forced the world into post-apocalyptic regression. Most of the planet is now a vast, barren, and burnt-out wasteland. We are never told the specifics of this event though it’s implied that global warming is, for the most part, at fault. Acts of barbarism are at an all-time high. Civilized humans struggle to survive but fight a losing battle. Cults, cannibals, and crazies roam this harsh, lawless environment. The civilized build protective walls around pockets of attainable water, tend wilted crops, and scrape out the most basic existence imaginable. The uncivilized simply take whatever they want; take what others have worked so hard to keep. The continued survival of the human race appears bleak and the back-breaking work of day-to-day subsistence is the only future anyone has to look forward to. Amidst all this turmoil, and to add insult to planetary injury, a sexually-transmitted virus one thousand times deadlier and faster than AIDS has turned sex into a painful, gruesome death-sentence. However, girls who have experienced their first menstrual period in the past twelve months are immune from the plague and are therefore highly desirable to marauders and other men of ill-repute. Rather than protected as saviors of the human race they are abducted from their homes and traded to the most powerful as playthings or as simple vessels of progeny. The stakes grow when a small, struggling community comes under attack by raiders and a group of young, pre-menstrual girls is kidnapped. The mother and sister of one of the abducted girls will stop at nothing to follow the kidnappers and secure her safe return.

To be honest, when I first read the premise in the opening chapter of Burn Down the Sky I thought, That’s a very weak assertion to base a novel on. Biology just doesn’t work that way, does it? Sex deadly? Well, yes, it can be, so wear protection. Oh yeah, the world has stopped production of everything. No more condoms. Wait, what about all those in grocery and convenience stores? Oh, the cities have all been burned to the ground during the food riots. However weak the original plot device might have felt in my mind it was long-forgotten before I was half-way through chapter two. The story became so immediately interesting to me that my questions were quickly forgotten. And then, to my surprise, all my objections were logically addressed and promptly answered in the course of the next few chapters. In some ways I felt the author knew these objections were obvious and that they would quickly occur to the audience. That Mr. Jaros recognized and addressed them early made my reading of the story that much more enjoyable.

You should know up-front that this story is not for the weak or faint of heart. There are quite a few gruesome, shocking, even grotesque moments in the pages of this book and there’s a lot of action and many scenes of intense violence. There’s death by fire and by explosion, there’s dismemberment, torture, death by gun shot and by beheading. Worse, there is life after rape, life after disfigurement, and life filled with unmitigated fear. Parents with young girls are strongly cautioned. Really bad things happen to some of the children in this story. (Some good things happen, as well, but telling you more would spoil things.) In a genre that is usually top-heavy with male characters I enjoyed seeing the woman’s perspective here and Jaros does a great job of creating strong, believable women role-models with real emotions. But, I also must say that combined with the violence and despair there are some very well-written scenes of redemption, perseverance and, of course, love. The atmosphere of Burn Down the Sky is somewhat reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but only in the sense that each of the worlds have been turned into wastelands and scenes from Mad Max are also recognizable in that the marauders are mostly viscous, cruel, violent, and a bit “touched in the head.” In the end I really could not put this book down. Fortunately for me, since I otherwise would have suffered a few more sleepless nights, it’s a rather quick read. Burn Down the Sky is a fun, well-written, post-apocalyptic quest story that entertains and I strongly recommended it for fans of Stephen King’s The Stand, the Mad Max films, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

4 out of 5 stars

The Alternative
Southeast Wisconsin… (más)