The epigraph to Stephen Wallenfels’s POD is a famous quote from Ronald Reagan’s September 1987 address to the UN General Assembly — the one that includes the sentence, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” It’s fitting; in many ways, POD reminds me of nothing so much as the morbid fantasies of post-nuclear holocaust that my tween friends and I dwelt on too much in the mid-1980s.
The disaster in POD comes in the form of massive black spheres that appear in the skies over the small town of Prosser in Washington State, Los Angeles, and presumably the entire world — spheres that annihilate in a flash of blue light anyone foolish enough to leave the shelter of their homes and buildings. In Prosser, sixteen-year-old Josh is stuck in the house with his father and his dog — who, interestingly, is able to venture outside at will without harm, and who doesn’t seem to hear the terrible shrieking noises that the spheres occasionally make. Meanwhile in LA, twelve-year-old Megs is hiding in the back of her mother’s old Chevy Nova in a hotel parking garage, left there by her mother who was last seen going to a “job interview” in a tight, low-cut dress.
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