Publication Date: November 20, 2024
For Owen Bale, life in Great Falls, Montana, is good. He has a loving wife and son, a career as a writer, and plenty of reasons to get up in the morning.
The charmed existence ends one sun-kissed day when everyone in town—maybe everyone everywhere—drops dead. Owen is left alone in a city on fire.
What now? Sit tight and wait for help? Seek out survivors? One thing’s certain: if Owen doesn’t move—and move fast—the stresses of the flash extinction will swallow him whole.
He sets out in search of people—and of the cause of the devastation. Cosmic cataclysms. Pandemics. Biological warfare. Earth has been through five mass extinctions. How do they differ from what’s happened now? And why was he spared?
And if there’s no one around, then why go on? Staying who he is until he finds survivors will take everything Owen has.
In the midst of a routine skydiving adventure, something happens that destroys life as Owen Bales knows it.
Author Steven Owad serves up a slice of post-apocalyptic fiction with a side order of satire in My Only Friend, The End. Narrated in first person, the story starts with Owen’s frantic efforts to get back to Great Falls to check on his wife, Ronnie, and four-year-old son, Evan.
What ensues is Owen’s eventual descent into madness as he finds himself surrounded by a world on fire with dead human bodies. With virtually anything at his fingertips, Owen alternately finds solace in alcohol and narcotics. His hallucinations feature conversations with his dead family, adding a touch of macabre.
He manages to pick up a few canine companions along the way, but tragedy isn’t far behind. His quest for other people serves up an adventure that has him holding on to his sanity by a thread.
It’s a bit ironic that Owen even manages to cast off his writer’s block and write a new adventure featuring his fearless private detective, Mike Stone. There’s an extra twist that makes this so unusual, but you’ll have to read the story to find out.
While My Only Friend, The End may not appeal to everyone, the author takes a post-apocalyptic event and ponders what life would be like if you were the only survivor.
Steven Owad has written everything from crime novels and literary short stories to stage plays and magazine features. His books have been praised in publications such as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and his screenplays have won awards and been optioned. After two decades as a journalist and news editor in Thailand and Poland, he now lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he hikes in the summer and reads about warm places in the winter. He never met a dog he didn’t love.
