- Publisher: Roundfire Books
- Publication date: September 2, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 320 pages
- ISBN-10: 1803418818
- ISBN-13: 978-1803418810
- Author: Mark Golding
The End by Mark Golding tries a little too hard. He combines aspects of mind altering alien spores, secret government programs, drug dealing organized crime, political priorities, and more. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always mesh these into a coherent whole. Individual scenes are generally done pretty well, but why those scenes are in the book the way they are don’t always make a lot of sense.
The protagonist, Martin, is an average guy trying to deal with the changes in his fiance. She is getting more ‘confident’ and then narcissistic and even brutal. Golding does a decent job of describing a deteriorating relationship as one party moves on in a new direction and the other doesn’t understand why. He wants to hold on to what he had and cannot accept how she is changing.
From there, however the story moves on and makes less and less sense. It feels kind of like one of the recent Marvel movies. It moves from one action scene to another with the only point being that there can be some action. It doesn’t make sense for a government agent to travel halfway around the world to find a single person to test a new drug on when 2% of the local population has the same infection, but that’s what they do in this book. There is also a civilian brought into an organized crime party without any real justification other than he is the ‘hero’ of the book. As the story proceeds, we get essentially a zombie apocalypse combined with alien invaders that would make for a nice pointless CGI battle at the end.
Golding is a fairly talented writer in bits and pieces. He writes nice little scenes, but the overall story doesn’t really make a lot of sense a lot of the time.
Matt Truxaw is the author of the hard science fiction thriller “Plastiphobia: aka Plastivore” and his newest novel “Anthrophobia: A Teacher’s Tale” – released January 3, 2025.
They are both available on Amazon in Paperback, Kindle and are free to read with Kindle Unlimited.
When you read either, he would really appreciate a review/rating on Amazon or your favorite book seller/book reader site.
More about Matt:
He was born in Orange County California many years ago and he still lives there. He has been reading books for most of those years and writing up book reviews for the last few years. He gets most of his books out of the library so expect a lot of old science fiction classics book reviews and other science related reviews in addition to newer books he comes across.
If you want to be ‘in-the-loop’ on these and other works, you can follow his author’s page on Amazon or his Facebook page.
For more reviews and articles by Matt here on Amazing Stories (Click here).
