William Alan Webb's Standing the Final Watch (The Last Brigade, Book 1)
A Book Review
Friends, Romans, Countrymen…
Nope, wrong speech
On March 29, 2025, a date which will live in infamy…
Nope, that’s not right either.
Hmmm…
Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned.
Yeah, that’s it.
Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I was beginning to read William Alan Webb’s Standing the Final Watch (The Last Brigade, Book 1). I was thoroughly enjoying the book in a way that I don’t usually enjoy the first book in a series. I almost gave up on it, anyway. I hear you working out there:
”Jimbo, that doesn’t make any sense.” It wouldn’t, except for the fact that the beginning of Standing the Final Watch reads more like a thriller than a Science Fiction novel for the first err… *mumble* pages. That doesn’t make it a bad book. I was just looking to read something for my Science Fiction and Fantasy review blog and, well, this didn’t have that SF/F feel to start out with. It’s not that I didn’t like it. I already said I loved it. It’s just that it started out feeling more Tom Clancy than David Weber.
But then the twisty windy thing happens (not to be confused with timey-wimey, that’s a different thing) and then all of a sudden we’re deep into Science Fiction territory and are headed for the land of Post-Apocalyptic America at breakneck speed. I was glad. Because I totally wanted to finish reading Standing the Final Watch and I was trying to get something read that I could get to while on my computer (I’m working on something else that I can only read on the app on my phone.) and this could now be it. And I would like to state that (fingers crossed) I totally kept reading out of faith in Webb and didn’t hie off to Amazon to find out if the book was written in the right genre. Totes. Maybe.
The thing is, I’m glad I kept reading. Standing the Final Watch is the type of book that I’ve always loved: It’s got great characters, an awesome story and enough action to keep us all on our toes. Webb moves things along at a pace that’s quick enough to hold interest and just slow enough that I could follow it. I found myself turning pages quickly, heading back from break late, and once it caused me to lose feeling in my legs when I didn’t get up from the toi...
NM. You get the idea. It’s a pageturner. Or sumfin’.
It’s weird. Most post-apocalyptic stories are based on a particular occurrence. It can be the zombie plague, or a nuclear war or..
Well, lots of things.
But it’s almost always a definable event. A moment, or a disease or war, whatever. The feeling that I get reading Standing the Final Watch is that the fall of the United States was nothing like that. It was more like the slow decay and fall of Rome, and gradual slide into the morass. I could be wrong. General Nick Angriff, US Army, seems to have slept through the end of the world as we know it. That’s alright, I get the reason why, both in universe and as writer myself. Seriously, there’s a reason that most post-apocalyptic stories don’t show the actual apocalypse: It’s a pain to detail and it’s usually largely irrelevant to the story that the author is writing.
I’m tempted to say that there is less worldbuilding here than I expected there to be, but there might actually be more. It’s this weird situation where there are almost two worlds that exist simultaneously: The one inside the compound and the one outside the compound. We don’t get a whole lot about the outside world just yet. The world inside the compound is pretty well shown though. This makes sense to me when I think about it. There is a LOT of world out there and it’s going to take awhile to get to all of it. There’s actually a lot of world on post as well, and Webb is taking his time trying to set things up before things really take off.
I get the feeling that Webb has taken pains to make his universe work and that he planned Standing the Final Watch to only reveal so much. There are a lot of books that come after this one, after all, and it makes sense to set things up to begin with. The weird part is that most of the time when authors do this it leads to a very slow first book. That is not at all the case here. Webb Heinleins his world in well. You’re getting the details mixed in with the action and it’s almost like he’s not worldbuilding at all but he really is. Like, I got the feeling that Webb has never even heard the term “infodump” but I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp on the world that he’s building based on what’s there. I don’t know if this is making any sense. Let me try it this way: STFW feels like it’s going to make a terrific staging ground for the rest of the series. Does that work?
The characters here are well written, believable and engaging. I want to root for Angriff. Others, I don’t want to root for as much but that’s because I’m not supposed to. Even when the characters do something they shouldn’t they do it for believable reasons. We’ve all knowingly done something stupid because we thought our motivations were good. So do the people in Standing the Final Watch. I love that about it.
There is a whole lot more of this story left to be told and I’m intrigued. This is the part where I would ordinarily say something along the lines of “I can’t wait till the sequel comes out” except for the fact that I’m late to the part and there are already elebenty bajillion sequels to Standing the Final Watch available. I guess I’ll just say that I’m off to download the next one on Amazon. You should join me in doing so, but probably not until you’ve read this one. It’s definitely worth your time.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Hidden Wires
Standing the Final Watch
William Alan Webb
Self-published, 2021
Standing the Final Watch is available at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional expense to you.
Standing the Final Watch