A massive, sprawling horror epic by a writer who seemed to bob along in the wake of the likes of King, Straub and Koontz, delivering books that at first glance seemed derivative, particularly of King, but which were consistently well-written novels of high-concept horror. Vampires descend on Los Angeles under cover of a massive dust storm; an alien bounty hunter rips a small town apart; a werewolf battles Nazis: I remember them all as being rippingly entertaining books, and it's always struck me as a bot odd that I never read this one. Well now I have.

It's terrific! Boom the world blows up! Billions die in the first chapter, and the living come to envy the dead in the radiation-scorched landscape! Evil stalks the wasteland in the form of the many-faced demon who seems to have a vested interest in the extinction of humanity for reasons that are never made precisely clear other than he's that kind of asshole. Hope also stalks the land in the form of Swan, an innocent young girl who may be the salvation of humanity! Humanity stalks the land also in the form of homicidal warmongering lunatics who build an army and go around killing and robbing people!

Violence! Horror! Supernatural evil! Fragile regeneration of life! It's all up for grabs and obviously the purest of popcorn nonsense, but McCammon writes well enough and intelligently enough to make it all read splendidly and smoothly. Oh, it makes you all nostalgic for the days when we lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation! It sucked, but at least it gave us groovy post-apocalyptic horror of a surprisingly high standard!