Review of The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Previous to this book I had only read The People of the Abyss by Jack London which is about being homeless. If you have not read this you really should as I'm pretty sure much of this still applies to this current day. I know that this author is more known for his Call of the Wild book, but when I got the chance to read this from Netgalley I figured why not. I had rather enjoyed his account of homelessness and figured that his attempt at post-apocalyptic writing might be just as interesting. For the record, I received a free kindle copy of this book for a fair and honest review.

Okay, at first, I wasn't really sure what to think of this book. It's more of a novella or short story than a full on novel.  One thing to consider is that the language and terms are from a very different time period than ours. For instance, the mention of air dirigibles is mentioned over and over again, and I gather that this must have been written before airplanes became commonplace.  But I did find it fascinating that even back then someone could imagine a plague like this just wiping out a good majority of people in a very short amount of time. That is one of the things that make books like this so horrifying, and strangely interesting because we all want to hope that humanity will endure and eventually rebuild civilization.  I have to admit that I found fault with the writer's imaging of this future world aside from technology that we have found obsolete. Honestly, I cannot imagine society plummeting so far into savagery that easily. I really do not think that if a few modern people survived a plague that their children and grandchildren would be totally back to the stone age. I mean we see this situation all the time in such shows as The Walking Dead and other popular media.

There is not too much more I can say about such a short story(I say this, and yet it took me quite awhile to actually finish it) that I didn't go over in this brief review. I did enjoy it. Don't get me wrong for the time it was written this isn't a bad or even terrible story. I just found this to be an average read for the reasons I stated above. I chose to rate this only 3 out of 5 stars on both Goodreads, and Netgalley.