David Williams’ WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL is an apocalyptic story about an Amish community struggling to survive after a solar storm fries the world’s electronics. I liked it for its freshness and fair degree of realism, but with some big reservations.

Being a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I always thought the Amish would be ideal survivors after a world-changing disaster. They live largely without technology right down to getting around using horse and buggy. They’re farmers and live close to the land. WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL convinced me they’d have all the skills to survive but would be ultimately doomed to die.

First, the story. We’re introduced to Jacob and his wife Hannah, son Jacob, and daughter Sadie. They’re farmers and craftsmen living in an Amish community outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They call themselves “plain folk,” speak a mixture of English and Dutch, and call the rest of America “the English.” Epileptic seizures and strange visions plague Sadie, who keeps saying the angels will come and the English will fall. When a solar storm fries the world’s electronics, billions of people must now survive without electricity.

The Amish are well positioned both to help and survive, but too many people live in the cities, there’s too little food, and the recovery efforts are too slow. The military imposes martial law, but even the military starts to break down. It isn’t long before starving refugees begin to raid the farms looking for food.

Enter the strong Amish faith and pacifism. This faith permeates every paragraph and chapter of the book, which is presented as Jacob’s journal (and had me skimming at times due to repetition). While his Christian faith is a great source of relief and strength in times of trouble, it also demands pacifism even in the face of certain murder. The family faces difficulties but overall very little hardship. By the end of WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL, and that ending comes a little abruptly, only one bad thing has happened to them, from which they are promptly rescued by a non-Amish. But it’s obvious at the end they’re all going to die because they can’t defend themselves nor can they even allow others to defend them.

But enter religion again. From what I could tell from Jacob’s narrative, the Amish believe in divine providence, which includes God answering prayers by intervening in the physical world. This is reinforced by Sadie’s visions being not mental illness but possibly communication from God. (I found her a cloying character with little to do in the book other than be patronizingly mysterious and prophetic. In fact, all of Jacob’s family are poorly developed characters who come across as two-dimensional.) So as the reader, for you to believe the book has a happy ending, you have to accept that God is okay with billions dying but that he’s looking out for a select few. Well, most of these people, anyway, as many Amish in America are already killed by the end of the book.

So I ended the read feeling a bit torn about it. I liked it. Actually, I liked it a lot. It’s well written. The way surrounding cities react to the crisis sounded realistic and worked for me. Jacob is an interesting and sympathetic narrator. I particularly enjoyed the look inside a typical Amish community and how they lived, which is laid out in the novel’s slow-burn setup. I loved the connection between a solar storm/EMP-like event and how the Amish would be ideally positioned to survive it. But for me the book just couldn’t connect the dots and make it work toward an ultimately satisfying conclusion.

THIRST by Benjamin Warner imagines life in a suburban community after a strange event destroys all water in nearby rivers and reservoirs. Uncleared traffic accidents and the power going out create an immediate sense of isolation and hardship. Eddie Gardner and his wife bunker down and negotiate how much they need to help themselves versus others in the community, believing help is on the way. Any day now, the power will return and they will have water again.

What follows is an interesting apocalyptic story whose idea meshes originally into the genre, though the story overall didn’t stand out for me. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t make a heavy emotional impression like the best apocalyptic books do. Warner captures the steadily mounting isolation, tension, and hardship of thirst well. In his book, he provides an interesting meditation on what people will do to survive. However, the characters often grate with their decisions until at times they seem to be actively working against their best self interest, and they don’t consider many sources of water such as car radiators. While a nice meditation on survival, nothing really struck me as poignant or original in a genre packed with such meditations (note I’ve read so much of this genre I’m a bit jaded). The narrative becomes increasingly unreliable due to Eddie steadily going mad with thirst, which effectively portrays his suffering, though at times it was confusing for this reader. The ending concludes well but may leave some readers unsatisfied, as the source of the water being eliminated isn’t explained (nor the power going out or all the accidents).

I liked the novel and recommend it to apocalyptic fiction fans looking for an original premise as well as newcomers to the genre. Warner writes well and I hope to read more of him in the future. While I enjoyed THIRST, however, it didn’t deliver the gut punches (nor the action) I like to see in apocalyptic fiction.