Hunting for the Lamb of God

Hunting for the Lamb of God

If food became unavailable due to a natural disaster and your only food source was human beings, would you eat someone? Would you go a step further and kill someone to eat them? These are decisions that would have to be made by normal, everyday people if faced with this type of situation. Hunting for the Lamb of God traces the footsteps of two families living across the street from each other in a suburb south of Denver, Colorado. The families join forces to navigate through a dystopian nightmare after America is hit with a super EMP (electromagnetic pulse), where food and water supplies run dry, and neighbors turn against neighbors, hunting each other for food to survive. Kirkus Reviews HUNTING FOR THE LAMB OF GOD BY JAMEY O'DONNELLJAMEY O'DONNELL ‧ RELEASE DATE: JULY 26, 2021 A fast-paced, dystopian tale of a near-future nuclear disaster told from a Christian viewpoint. Anuclear strike over America effectively throws much of the Northern Hemisphere back to the Stone Age in O'Donnell's apocalyptic thriller. On May 24, 2022, three nuclear warheads detonate in the thermosphere above the United States. Sent by Iran—and facilitated by North Korea—the super electromagnetic pulse immediately wreaks havoc. Satellites become disabled, airplanes fall from the sky, cars stop working, and cellphones become useless. In Centennial, a suburb of Denver, the family of Bill Jenkins—a statistician with the Department of Agriculture who's working out of Washington, D.C.—is already preparing for the worst. Jenkins, a "prepper of sorts," has an underground bunker filled with a year's worth of food and water for his wife, Viv, and their two sons, Brian and Mark. As the world devolves into chaos, the Jenkinses share their supplies with their surviving neighbors, Julie Price and her kids, Jack, Rocky, and Kate. But when people start dying of starvation, the group faces nomadic cannibals hunting for human prey. As life becomes a hellscape, Jenkins—living in an elaborate subterranean government bunker while working to get the country back on its feet—learns of a top-secret underground railroad system that connects cities all over the continent, one of which is Denver. Jenkins eventually gets the green light to find his family and return with them to Washington—but what he discovers in Colorado is beyond his darkest nightmares. This relentlessly paced, action-packed, and character-driven novel from the author of Meth War (2021) may strike some readers as a fusion of William R. Forstchen's One Second After and Stephen King's The Stand with a powerful Christian perspective. The story can get heavy-handed, however, when it comes to religion. Criminals, for example, are "men and women living their lives without God," some of whom may "embrace Satan." But any proselytizing fits seamlessly into the narrative as the Jenkinses and Prices find strength and wisdom in their faith-based lives to move forward in their quest to survive. A fast-paced, dystopian tale of a near-future nuclear disaster told from a Christian viewpoint. The BookViral Review: A bold apocalyptic novel that's not afraid of breaking free of the genre tropes, Hunting for the Lamb of God takes its readers into a USA decimated by an EMP attack by rogue states. With themes of courage, love and the adherence to personal values it's a hard book to put down as Jamey O'Donnell overcomes an overly clichéd genre to deliver genuinely stirring drama. There's no escaping the profound sentiments and ironies of his plot and on this level, his characters are both clearly defined and charismatic. They amplify the horrors of an apocalyptic event. The vast majority of apocalyptic novels don't dwell on the science fiction behind "what caused the apocalyptic event," but instead focus on unique characters and character arcs. O'Donnell gets a good balance between the two and it's clear from the start that his narrative is informed by in-depth research. In creating his characters, he gets into their hearts and minds and the details of their lives, so that the fictional elements fit easily with this realism. He's thought through the consequences of life where the semi-conductive chips in our mobile phones fail, where there is no power and access to water supplies and then he's asked how far a person would go to feed their family. The answer is chilling and what emerges is a smart, gripping and imaginative narrative. O'Donnell isn't coy about gore and plot threads are made to converge in ways that are both gruesome and fascinating, thought-provoking and oddly touching. But whilst the shock factor is ever present it's the isolation of his principal characters, the Jenkins/Price family and Bill's quest to reunite with them that allows the passion in O'Donnell's narrative to shine through. With the hint of futuristic or alien technology in the background and a cliffhanger ending there's the promise of more to come for the Jenkins and their extended family. A highly enjoyable read Hunting fo