The Rift

By: Walter Jon Williams

Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly

Fast-paced and terrifyingly real, The Rift is a blockbuster novel of destruction, heroism, and survival that is sure to grab fans of recent disaster movies.

It starts with the dogs. They won’t stop barking. And then the earth shrugs - 8.9 on the Richter scale. It’s the world’s biggest earthquake since Lisbon in 1755, and it doesn’t hit California or Japan or Mexico, but New Madrid, Missouri, a sleepy town on the Mississippi River. Seismologists had predicted the scope of the disaster - but no one listened.

For hundreds of miles around, dams burst, engulfing entire counties in tidal waves of mud and debris. Cities collapse into piles of brick and shards of glass. Hospitals and schools crumble. Bridges twist and snap, spilling rush-hour traffic into rivers already swollen with bodies. Within minutes, there is nothing but chaos and ruin from St. Louis to Vicksburg, from Kansas City to Louisville. Every bridge down, every highway torn, every house gone.

America’s heartland has fallen into the nightmare known as the Rift, a fault line in the earth that wrenchingly exposes the fractures in American society itself. As a strange white mist smelling of sulfur rises from the crevassed ground, the real terror begins for the survivors, who will soon envy the dead, including:

• Jason Adams, a teenager separated from his mother;
• Nick Ruford, an African-American engineer searching for his estranged daughter;
• Noble Frankland, the television preacher whose visions of hell have become all too real;
• Larry Hallock, a technician working frantically to prevent a nuclear meltdown at his power station;
• And Omar Paxton, a sheriff and Ku Klux Klansman who seeks racial vengeance in the turmoil of disaster.

Walter J. Williams has created a modern American disaster saga, a story based on terrifying fact, filled with non-stop action, peopled with characters who are heartbreakingly real. Witnessing authentic heroes surfacing in the unlikeliest places, you will share their horror, feel their despair, and triumph with them in their struggle to survive. One thing you will know for sure: It can happen here. And sooner or later, it will.

©2013 Walter Jon Williams (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Scarily Prescient.Should be required reading!

I can't believe this was written in 99!! Terrifying, well written and set in 2016 (ironic) this book predicted so much of what's happening now. Before before there was fracking and detainment camps :/ Excellent characters and definitely a book for our times. This should be a mini-series. I never thought I would say this but even scarier than my all time fav Apocalyptic book, The Stand.

Fantastic book could not put down

Would make great tv series is a very strong story. covers a lot of issues other than a disaster.

Too scattered

The book was not what I expected it to be. I enjoyed some elements, but there were too many scattered sub stories. It dragged and got bogged down quite a bit because there were just too many characters to keep up with. You ended up not caring about the characters because about the time you found yourself getting invested in what was happening to them the story would switch to a different set of characters. I found the historical references distracting and tedious. They played no part in the current story.

Very long winded

It takes several chapters, before you get to the actual earthquake. Lots and lots of details. Unrealistic about some things like only 15,000 to 20,000 people died during the initial quake and the US president with reelection on his mind plans to encourage a race war in the last chapter. I admit I did skip chapters to get to parts with some action because it moved so slowly.

Boring at first

This starts out very slow but after about 6 hours it picks up and it’s a decent story.