Are you ready for the Whateverpocalypse? These seven definitely weren’t. One morning two Harvard freshmen, one of them blind, an ex-con turned hermit preacher, a young office worker, a suburban juvenile delinquent, an rpg gamer, and an astrophysicist working at MIT find themselves all alone in a changed Boston. Boston is falling into ruin covered in wild vegetation and wandering wildlife while the weather moves from one extreme to another. They struggle to survive while seeking answers, but what little they find makes no sense and the whole time they have the uncanny feeling that they are not alone. 

One of my first impressions of The Apocalypse Seven is that few people have any idea how survive on their own and I would absolutely be as bewildered as these people are. Grocery store shelves are empty and they find only a meager supply of meal substitute bars. Was this mass starvation due to climate change? Sea level is clearly higher than it was and the weather is severely wacky. Electricity is gone and batteries can’t hold a charge so it might be an EMP apocalypse. At least there’s no undead, so it’s clearly not a zombie apocalypse! The group gradually comes to call it the Whateverpocalypse, but none of their hypotheses are possible because they couldn’t happen overnight or vaporize everyone! 

This is a slightly quirky apocalypse story about seven random strangers searching for answers. I have no desire to spoil anything, but I can say that unlike many books in the genre they actually find definite answers. Aside from a little backstory on each of them, the whole point of the book is to find those answers rather than on survival and building a new life. There are interesting surprises along the way that I haven’t seen in the genre before, which contributes to the gradual build up to the big reveal. Even that reveal hid surprises. Unfortunately, I found the resolution unsatisfactory. The questions are answered and make sense well enough, keeping in mind I’ve never been interested in physics, so maybe like the seven I just didn’t expect the end of human civilization to be so…. well I could say, but that would spoil the whole thing!