Another stunning story collection by Boyle. He hasn't failed me yet... with even a single unenjoyable story in the first five collections. I must admit that this one is so far my least favorite of the five collections, as he focuses on modern humans with this collection rather than the environment. What makes this collection less enjoyable, is that in almost every story, the focus is on really really dark spirited humans. Or simply some of the darkest moments in mostly decent people. Not sunny reading. 'Termination Dust' is a perfect example, what you think is happening gets flipped on its head. (I also somehow remembered a name from this story that was also in 'Drop City' that I read years ago... not sure if its the same character but the scenario also seemed to be one from the book. Possibly the story inspired the novel. But the story is perfect as is. Drop City is fantastic too.) The most positive story might be 'The Underground Gardens' which I'm just now learning was based on a real person who dug tunnels and a house underground. What was going on with Mr. Boyle while writing these? As usual, the writing on a sentence level, couldn't be better. I like all of these stories equally, but if I had to pick two favorites: 'Going Down' and 'Termination Dust'. 'Going Down' has fantastic bits of a sci-fi book the character is reading, which makes me wonder why Boyle doesn't like genre? There definitely isn't a bad story in the bunch. Just many many bad events. This is my least favorite of his five short story collections so far, but it's still a solid book. ( )

After the Plague is a nice collection of short stories. Boyle certainly knows how to string words together to make them sound amazing. But about halfway through (if not earlier) I started to grow a little tired of the invariably masculine point of view. Even when Boyle writes from a woman’s perspective (which is rare enough), it’s somehow still obsessed with men/masculinity. While I do find that an interesting topic, a little more variation would have been nice.

On my blog I talk about each short story separately: http://kalafudra.com/2016/02/02/after-the-plague-t-c-boyle/ ( )

The stories in After the plague never had any appeal to me, and I thoroughly loathed reading this collection of short stories. ( )

Wow. This is dark! I'm really enjoying this story collection. ( )

http://gr4c5.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/after-the-plague/ ( )