Have you ever seen one of those internet memes where it has four different boxes from left to right, gradually showcasing the person’s reaction while willing the universe to pump its breaks? That’s what I was envisioning while reading Keegan Kennedy’s The Harbinger. It started off like most novels do, establishing the central characters and letting the imminent threat loom in the distance. But, it spends way too much time fleshing them out and it’s literally chapters until people start dying from the disease. Society falls, nearly overnight, and the survivors are left to fend for themselves. But, it spends way too much time getting the point across that this is basically a mass extinction. Then, two more plot devices are added to the story and it’s like… OK, Keegan, stop already. You’re going way off the train tracks and I, as a reader, want off this ride! Still, I forced myself to finish The Harbinger since I paid for my Kindle download and now here we are with my review. It’s, quite obviously, going to be mixed.
Published by Kennedy-Empire Media in July 2016, Keegan Kennedy’s The Harbinger follows the end of the human race at the hands of a mysterious flu-like disease. It was uncovered, frozen deep in the earth, and altered in a lab in Russia. Unfortunately for everyone, the virus gets out and moves from Russia to the entire world, killing billions of people in a matter of hours. Once the virus starts its very own apocalypse, the story focuses on survivors and victims in Memphis, Tennessee. The characters we see are all unique from each other – the rich husband, the closeted minor league baseball player, the cancer patient, the Asian cop – yet they are all thrust into groups and are forced to lean on each other if they hope to survive. I’ll admit I found a handful of their stories interesting and endearing, and I was bored by the others. The ones above are the ones I felt any emotion toward.
And that’s another part of the problem. About 75% of the way through The Harbinger, more and more characters pop up at an alarming rate. Many of them come and go for a variety of reasons, but it’s way too much way too quick. I didn’t care about 50% of the characters already and now you want to introduce a whole bunch of other canon fodder? No thanks. Again, I flipped the pages – or flicked the screen – over the camps that I didn’t care about. All of these criticisms about story and characters are in no way meant to convey that Keegan is a bad writer. He’s actually quite talented and paints very clear pictures in an effortless way, but I think this novel got away from him. I see that The Harbinger has been turned into a series, and that would have been the better way to pace its plot developments. As it stands, The Harbinger is too long and goes from 0 to 100 to 0 to 1,000 without any sort of moderation. It was like The Walking Dead meets The Stand meets The Real World and it was stifling.
This pains me, because The Harbinger had the potential to be something great. The use of the scientists in the lab, the vivid actions of the government to contain the outbreak, several character deaths and revelations… It was all there. The potential was right there. And then maybe Keegan had a couple Red Bulls and ran away with the story. There’s another plot that is introduced later in the book, one that deals with… slutty zombies… and that was fantastic and unique, too, definitely material that hasn’t been covered in any other end of the world book yet. But the next plot progression that followed killed that hype. The Harbinger stumbles over itself and doesn’t let the events sink in, it doesn’t let you fall in love with the characters before it beats you over the head with something new. Sometimes doing too much isn’t the best way to go. Sometimes simple is key..I saw glimpses of hope in The Harbinger, but finished my reading being severely let down.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 10.
