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Whenever I’m in the mood for a snack and go to the fridge, I rarely select anything healthy. In the mood for science fiction, I threw Extinction Point by an author named Paul Antony Jones in my Kindle cart. Published in 2013, I liked that this book hit two of my favorite keywords��Female Protagonist and End of the World—and appreciated that it was free to borrow on Kindle Unlimited. I can’t say that I had zero expectations because Justin Cronin’s vampire apocalypse novels certainly set the bar for what’s possible in the genre, not to mention a good old British doomsday like War of the Worlds or Day of the Triffids. What I got here was amateur hour by comparison with one of my least favorite keywords: Ends In Cliffhanger.��

The story is true blue ��50s science fiction. Emily Baxter, reporter for the “New York Tribune,�� is ordering a cappuccino one fine day when reports of strange weather in Russia hit the Internet. Soon, the reported red rain begins to seep upon New York, killing birds immediately. By the time Emily makes it back to the office, the news out of Eastern Europe is that there is no news—no one can be reached. CNN provides footage out of France of dead bodies and reports of many sick people before their on-the-scene eyewitness vomits blood and collapses. Emily returns to her fab skyrise apartment where her cop boyfriend joins her. Pretty soon, he’s drowning in his own blood but rather than join him, Emily survives, one of roughly 8 million in New York to win the doomsday survival lottery.��

Everything in this book feels like the first thing that popped into the author's head, which is a problem when none of it’s original. The protagonist is a reporter from Iowa, because, why not. Lois Lane is pretty bitchin��. Her boyfriend is a cop, because, why not, it's a reliably male profession. The setting is Manhattan because, why not, based on almost every end of the world movie, TV series or book, New York dies first. The first survivor Emily encounters is a dog, because, if you're alone at the end of the world, you need a dog. This is story development along the lines ofFamily Feud, where “Surveys Says!�� is what the author went with.��First place here is you lose me as a reader.

The story is mostly about how everyone in New York dies at the same moment except our bland heroine, which is pretty heavy stuff, but the writing isn’t up to telling that story. Emily tells us what she’s thinking, which is often some variation of, “This is very, very bad.�� Yeah, totally. I can get that. It felt more like the author was watching Mystery Science Theater and commenting on this silly movie he was watching as opposed to something that was happening.��



I love a good apocalypse story centered on women who go shopping, meaning, they gear up for the journey ahead. The movie Night of the Comet put an ��80s twist on that. My favorite aspect of Extinction Point was Emily gearing up at the local bike shop and Whole Foods as she prepared to pedal off Manhattan Island. Because if you want to survive doomsday, your calf muscles better be in shape and bicycle repair knowledge wouldn’t hurt.  

I found it a particulrly lazy effort how at least three times, Emily closes her eyes and waits to die with all the survival instinct of a crash test dummy, only to be saved by the author. I think this is referred to as “deus ex machina.��

My biggest complaint with the novel is that instead of providing the reader an ending, we get a set-up for the next novel. A lot of this was going on in the self-publishing world a few years ago with novels being sublet into four or five smaller novels in order to move more product. In other words, you’d have to spend $100 to get the whole story. This makes it impossible for me to recommend this, even if the writing was high quality, which it is not.