Okay. The traveling is mostly 9but not completely) over with, and the unpacking is to a stage where, while not finished, isn’t weighing on my mind and preventing me from working again, so let’s get back to it and jump right into things!
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Women In Horror Year: Day 134
Final Impact by Yvonne Navarro
Out Of Print
On the day after the last Thanksgiving holiday of the twentieth century, the world waits breathlessly for the Hubble Space Telescope to record pictures of the unprecedented impact of the rogue planet Millennium with Jupiter. Yet as the world waits, they finally learn the terrible torn apart by Jupiter's immense gravitational pull, the remains of Millennium are now hurtling unstoppably toward Earth.
In the wake of the resulting panic are born both dangerous and honorable a greedy medical administrator and a brutal ex-convict; a narcissistic drug dealer and a murderous policewoman; a young man and the strange girlfriend whose life he struggles to save; an astronomer and his wife desperate for safety... and a small group of people in Chicago gifted with terrible foreknowledge and hidden skills, fated to unite in a battle for survival after the...
FINAL IMPACT.
First published in 1997 by Bantam, and having since had multiple reprintings in various formats, Final Impact was Yvonne Navarro’s third solo novel, and a bit of a departure from her more straightforward horror fare. While there is a supernatural element in the book, it is muted and mostly in the background. (To say more about it would involve major spoilers). Instead, the book leans heavily into apocalyptic science-fiction. Think Deep Impact meets The Stand.
One of Yvonne’s greatest strengths as a writer — be it her own work or the myriad media tie-ins she’s penned over the years — has always been her characterization. She understands human nature, and she’s great at capturing those quirks and foibles and motivations on the page. In Final Impact, she’s working with a massive cast of characters, even moreso than what she used in AfterAge (reviewed here). It’s a juggling act that she pulls off flawlessly. The plot never drags, and the reader never loses track of who is who or where they are.
Note that this is apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic. The end of the world is happening, present tense, in this novel. If you want to read about the aftermath of a rogue runaway planet slamming into ours, read the sequel, Red Shadows, which we will talk about here tomorrow.
Final Impact is — sadly — currently out of print, however there are copies widely available on the secondary market, ranging in price from $7 to $200 (depending on edition and other factors).