The Sixth Seal (Paperback)

One terrible night, a cloud of some unspecified but man-made substance passes over the surface of the entire earth, causing all living organisms unfortunate enough to be found above ground to vanish suddenly. The central characters, a recently widowed mother, her son and her son's friend, awake after spending the night in a makeshift fort in the old foundation of a silo to a world in which everyone in their small English village and in the world beyond, and most of the animals, have disappeared. The only evidence that the disappeared ever existed is the hair they left behind on their pillows and in the cars that litter the roads, having crashed as soon as their drivers were gone.

What I found most haunting about the story is the way the author evokes the emptiness of the world in which the protagonists find themselves, especially its profound silence. Since the birds and insects disappeared along with most of the people and other animals, there is simply nothing to make noise. A true silence pervades the changed world, silence the survivors have never known. Many is the time since listening to The Sixth Seal that I have noted the noise that constantly surrounds us all no matter where we are - the songs of birds and buzzes of insects, music from passing cars and houses, the rumble of automobiles, distant trucks and airplanes flying high overhead.

This story focuses not on how the apocalypse happened, but on how the survivors cope with the horror of the empty new world to which they awake. The disaster described seemed particularly relevant in the age of genetically modified organisms and biological weapons. The behavior of the characters is not that of the frenetic heroes of movies, but of individuals numb with shock and struggling to find the will to survive. This story struck me as a strikingly realistic vision of how people would act in the face of a suddenly depopulated world, what choices they would face and how they might choose. I recommend it to all ages, especially as a book to listen to on a long car trip.