The Last Town on Earth (Audio)

by Thomas Mullen

read by Henry Strozier

(Prince Frederick: Recorded Books, LLC, 2006)

MP3 Audiobook, 1.45 GB, 15.7 Hours, Fiction

ISBN: 9781419398025, US$39.99

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: In this remarkable debut novel from Thomas Mullen, an idyllic hamlet is torn apart by fear and paranoia during the 1918 flu pandemic. Nestled in the quiet woods of the Pacific Northwest, the town of Commonwealth is a haven for the loggers who live there, until the flu starts striking down entire surrounding villages. When the residents of Commonwealth vote to quarantine themselves, armed guards are poised at the one road leading to town. But then a disheveled—and apparently sick—soldier approaches begging for food and shelter. Shots are fired, and soon Commonwealth is plunged into turmoil. With its examination of community and patriotism, The Last Town on Earth is a timely allegory for our modern society. Narrator Henry Strozier delivers a riveting performance that captures the swirling emotions of this powerful tale.

My Review: When it says on the cover that “The Last Town on Earth is a timely allegory for our modern society,” I don’t think whoever wrote those words could possibly imagine in 2006 how apropos they would be in the Fall of 2009. With fears of an H1N1 pandemic, labor issues, teabaggers and war protestors and questions of patriotism and what it means to be a “patriotic American” and a liberal President running on a platform of peace and then failing to deliver in a time of war … it was hard to remember at times that Mullen had set his book in 1918 against the backdrop of the Spanish flu pandemic and World War I. The book is really that timely.

I’m a late-comer to the camp of those who love The Last Town on Earth … and my only defense is that when it first arrived in bookstores I was in the middle of my undergrad work and had heavy reading loads for those classes and my local libraries did not have this audiobook edition of the book. Now, though, in the Pacific Northwest (where Last Town is set, and as near as I can tell, not too terribly far where Mullen’s fictional hamlet is more or less situated) I have discovered this book and become a full convert to the brilliance and power that this book has.

The Last Town on Earth is social allegory, cautionary tale, love story, and tragedy in one, with more than a little of the paranoia and scapegoating of classic The Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” It is this last aspect, the paranoia and scapegoating that inform the final third of the novel that I found to be most fascinating. I am very interested in how novels portray the depths to which human being will sink when confronted with situations that spiral out of their control, and how that informs the individual will to survive and the concept of charity and community (and often how it tosses these later two aspects out the window). Perhaps this is why I am so fascinated with horror as a literary genre. It is one in which the baser instincts are often on display and which people do things they wouldn’t normally, and then seeks to either rationalize these actions, or it leaves the character (and thus the Reader) to wonder at the motives and why these actions were taken, and often there is no cut-and-dry answer. This is very true of The Last Town on Earth. Mullen takes what appears to be a very simple concept: the survival of the community over the individual, and then shows what happens when that ideal starts to break down.

The Last Town on Earth is a very powerful novel and the audiobook edition lacks for none of the emotional punch that Mullen has packed into his book, and this is mostly due to the masterful reading of narrator Henry Strozier. Strozier’s basso voice is a perfect choice to narrate a book full of rough men (lumberjacks, river drivers, mill foremen, etc.) and rough ideas. I enjoyed every minute of the time I spent in Commonwealth, and cannot recommend this book strongly enough to any and all Readers. I will definitely be seeking this book out in print as I would like to own a copy (mostly because I believe there might be a critical paper in the book, but also because it is a simply amazing and compelling story). I think from here I need to seek out John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.