While preparing for my recent trip to Laos, I knew I’d need a fair share of entertaining novels on audio-book to keep me company. While I’ve enjoyed listening to Clive Cussler recently, I wanted to branch out into new territory, so I acquired this “Book 01” in Bobby Akart‘s Yellowstone series, Hellfire.

Although I run a book review site for people who want to test the waters of a book before delving in, I personally enjoy going into books with little knowledge about the story or author (or, generally speaking, public opinion about either), if I can help it. I went into this series totally blind, and I’m mostly happy with what I found.

First a quick critique based upon my own personal preferences. The Yellowstone series ultimately will be about survival in a post-apocalyptic world, following the devastating explosion of the super-volcano gurgling beneath the expanse of Yellowstone National Park. This first book introduces the characters and danger and finally leaves the readers looking into the void of an exploding world. Knowing now that there are four books to the series, however, I feel a bit let down in having tasted the preparations for survival without actually witnessing any of it. Instead, much of the book is spent with the characters drinking beer in a comfy cabin chatting away about the possibilities. Perhaps I’m too used to apocalyptic films and series which begin in media res, but I feel like we readers would have been better served by reading the end-of-the-world stuff first, and then enjoying a prequel after all’s said and done. Of course, I can’t judge Bobby Akart too much, since I’ve not yet read the follow-ups, but after finishing this, I don’t feel the pull to “read on” so much as I do the regret of not having simply started with Book 02.

With that critique aside, I thought Akart’s character were well drawn and realistic, each with his or her own defining characteristic. Jake’s the rugged protagonist that every man hopes to be, with a dash of celebrity, macho-sensibilities, and survival expertise mixed in to his beer-filled bachelor-pad cabin in the middle of nowhere. The PhD girl’s the daughter of missionaries to the Philippines who watched her parents die in a volcano and has thus spent the rest of her life trying to predict and warn people about the next Big One. The TV journalist Elle is a one-legged Briton with sass and a nose for cover-ups, and I’m sure she’ll end up a natural heroine in her own way soon. The grad students were completely annoying in the audio-book version, and I’m sure if I had read the book on paper I’d have engineered a different voice and attitude in my head than did the reader. I hope they mature (and get a room) fast.

The chapters in this book are short, so the novel moved along quite fast. One needn’t know much about science to understand the story. Akart does very well to explain it all without the data turning into some boring lecture we’d rather skip. He also backs ups his scientific claims (I believe) on his website.

The language in this book is moderate, and although I don’t know how evangelistic he is as an author, I anticipate some spiritual conversations in the coming books. He seems to have set the stage for suchalready in this book, especially in terms of the budding romance between the two lead characters. This type of writing from a moderately Christian perspective reminds me much of the Invasion Series by Vaughn Heppner, and I hope to be as surprisingly entertained by this series as I was by that. I do plan to continue the series, though in my location, this first book was the only one I could access on audio, so it might be a while for me.

©2018 E.T.

Read More from Bobby Akart:

• Yellowstone: Hellfire (2018)
• Yellowstone: Inferno (2018)
• Yellowstone: Fallout (2018)
• Yellowstone: Survival (2018)

Read More Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Novels:

• The Last New Yorkers by George Allen England (1911)
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
• The Last Ship by William Brinkley (1988)
• Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick (2004)
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
• The Hunger Games (series) by Suzanne Collins (2008)
• Son of Heaven (series) by David Wingrove (2011)
• Contamination (series) by T.W. Piperbrook (2013)
• The Giver by Lois Lowry, adapted by P. Craig Russell (2019)
• Fairy Godparents: Raising a Fairy Child by Indahari Setyo (2020)