On the one hand, that's a terrible cover, on the other hand there's something Lynchian about its utter emptiness, its lack of composition due to awkward cropping, the absence of life, the door hanging open like a corpse's mouth. It reeks of helplessness and dread, which were the number one and number two emotions I experienced in the Eighties every time my Dad told me there were at least 10 Soviet ICBMs pointed at our hometown right that very minute and when the button got pushed we'd only have 30 minutes before everyone we loved was vaporized in a flash of white light.
Author Gloria Miklowitz understood my fears. Author of something like 60 YA novels (some people say 45), most of them socially conscious, her books Did You Hear What Happened to Andrea? and The War Between the Classes were turned into CBS After School Specials. Andrea's Story: A Hitchhikers Tragedy is exactly as awesome as you think it would be, but the only way I've been able to catch a glimpse of Miklowitz's race-conscious The War Between the Classes is in this very, very strange, fanmade trailer. Made by a German person? Maybe?
Miklowitz had a taste for danger, as witnessed by her classic titles Earthquake!, Paramedic Emergency!, Unwed Mother, and Save That Raccoon, but in 1985 she wrote After the Bomb for Point, a new paperback imprint from Scholastic Books that would go on to publish six titles per year, including The Lifeguard, Psi Patrol, and the novelizations for Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, Encino Man, and Arachnophobia. In 1993, the line slimmed down to three titles per year, and even today it's still publishing a couple of books, like The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall.
In After the Bomb Philip and Matt are two brothers, one of them older and perfect (Matt), the other younger and gripped with a nonstop internal monologue of self-doubt (Philip). Their world is full of not-quite right details, like Philip’s best friend Tim showing up dressed for a school dance in pressed black pants, shined shoes, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a tie. Is he a teenaged accountant? A nuclear physicist? Their father sits down to dinner and says, "So, how’s my family?" which I believe is the way robots start conversations. And the book is loaded with cryptic sentences, like, "Horgan’s Heroes, as the track team was called, were goose-stepping out of the gym in their warm up exercises." If there had ever been a CBS Afterschool Special of it, I would suspect only Leni Riefenstahl could do justice to that scene.
Philip is obsessed with Matt, who likes to work out and play Beethoven "too loud." Philip is paranoid that everyone likes Matt better, and he may be onto something since his mom likes to wear Matt's clothes. When she calls Matt down to carve the roast it sends Philip into an existential crisis, “Why hadn’t Mom called him to carve the roast? he wondered. She hardly ever asked him to do any of the more interesting things.” Constipated with shame, Philip is practically begging the bombs to fly.
He doesn't have to wait long. As subtle as a mushroom cloud, this is one of those books where every news story is about nuclear proliferation, every radio broadcast is about increasing US/Soviet tensions, every conversation revolves around nuclear build-up, and even their dad is an engineer who builds nukes. When pop tries to launch SUBROUTINE: SECONDARY CONVERSATION at dinner, Philip changes the subject and his father begins SUBROUTINE: QUERY SON.
"Philip, doesn't anything interest you other than sports?" He asks.
"You grown-ups built the bomb," Philip says. "It's up to you to do something about it."
"I can't believe you said that!" his father cries, appalled.
Mom sends Philip outside to rake leaves so he doesn't further outrage his father, but a few minutes later she comes out to criticize him for the way he's raking.
“I don’t believe it! I just don’t believe it! Where is your head? Who rakes leaves uphill into a can?”
What this book needs is a nuclear war.
Guts twisting in shame, Philip grabs his guitar and heads to the fallout shelter the house's previous owners built. Matt comes down with his girlfriend Cara and everyone affectionately calls each other "turkey" for a while until there's a bright white flash and they all fall over and make a big mess which really upsets Philip. Matt heads topside to find their mom because he's amazing, and Cara goes into shock. Fortunately, Philip has watched enough TV to know that when a girl goes into shock she needs a couple of smacks across the face. If you're attuned to the big sack of failure that is Philip you imagine this is the moment when he will be charged for assault, but instead it snaps Cara out of her emotional coma. Could nuclear war turn this sack of self-loathing and nervous tics into an Upstanding Young Man?
Matt returns with their mom, who's covered in gross blisters, and a few minutes later Matt’s barfing all over himself, Cara is peeing into a pot while Philip desperately stares at the wall and whistles loudly to block out the sounds, and mom's hair starts falling out. Philip manages to get the world's shittiest family over to their neighbor's house and they all hide/die in the Giamo's basement while the radio fills them in on what happened.
“Don’t panic," it drones. "A nuclear bomb has exploded over Los Angeles. Stay indoors.”
Turns out it was just an accidental launch by the Soviets and they feel really bad about it. To everyone in the basement, it's a huge relief.
“Oh, thank God!” Mrs. Giamo exclaimed. “Thank God. It’s just LA!”
“Just a few million people," Mr. Giamo said. "Thank the Lord for small favors.”
Even Philip seems to be calming down.
“He had grown used to the smell of smoke, and now of vomit and excrement, and to the faint banshee wails that came from the world outside.”
Deciding that they have to get their mom and her suppurating wounds to safety, they build a stretcher, which of course Matt is the best at, even if he is yakking all over himself every five minutes, and they drag mom to the Church of the Lighted Window but it’s packed with wall-to-wall wounded who look “disheveled and harried” They try the hospital next, but it’s got more wounded and is coated with even more vomit, which occurs so frequently in this book it's practically its own character.
The doctors at Barfy Hospital are refreshingly brusque, organizing the screaming wounded like they're sorting socks.
“This one won’t make it!" A doctor barks. "Put him in the other room. Next!”
Philip gets turned into an errand boy and the nurse finally shows him how to start IV drips, making him practice on his own unconscious mother's veins. When the hospital runs out of water and they discover that help won't come to take people to special burn units for two more days, a nurse bullies Philip into finding a solution for their water crisis. Used to being bullied and told what to do, Philip obligingly runs off into the wasteland, saves a baby from being eaten by a coyote, adopts his very own Apocalypse Mutt, and finds a Department of Water and Power engineer who tries to explain how to restart the city's water system, but that only reminds Philip of his one fatal weakness.
“Do you know anything about the water system, how it works?” the engineer asked.
“Philip’s face grew warm. If Matt had been here he would know. Matt knew such things.”
Just as some readers claim they can tell when a man is writing female characters, if the name "Gloria" on the cover didn't give it away, it's kind of obvious that this is a woman writing about two brothers. Philip's compulsive admiration of Matt, constantly declaring how beautiful Matt is, and then flying into inadequate funks whenever he compares himself to Matt doesn't feel like brothers to me. Neither does the way that all the boys in the book, before the bombs dropped, were constantly suggesting outfits to each other and complimenting each other on their fashion choices. Now, at the climax, as Philip enacts his plan to string 1000 feet of garden hose between a local swimming pool and the hospital to solve its water crisis, someone asks Philip how strong he is. Immediately, a crestfallen Philip calls up the fact that Matt can bench press 60 pounds and works out regularly.
But after forcing some looters to assist Project: Hose at gunpoint, Philip gets his hose to the hospital, where he finds that rather than take care of his mom like the nurse promised, his mom has been shuffled to the back of a pile of dying, burned bodies and is comatose. But Philip doesn't give up, and disguises himself in hospital scrubs, impersonates a doctor, gets him mom on a helicopter transport (cutting in front of 60 other burn victims in the process), and then declares to Cara and Matt, who's only just stopped throwing up on himself, that he's walking the nine miles to his dad's lab to see if he's alive.
Matt tells him he's dumb, and no one is going to go with him. It's too dark, it's too far, Philip has never been good for anything anyways.
"“F —— you," Philip snarls and hikes out into the nuclear wasteland, his man crush fatally shattered.
But then..."It occurred to him that that was exactly what the Russians and Americans were always doing." And he falls in love with Matt again, shouting, "Shake it, buddy!" As "He felt a rush of relief and joy spreading through him."
Which just goes to show that even a nuclear incident, radiation poisoning, and a baby almost eaten by coyotes can’t destroy our sick, unhealthy, co-dependent relationships.