Lichtenberg by Tom O’Connell

Temple Dark Books, 2025

ISBN: 9781068250736

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

Buy: Amazon.com  | Temple Dark Books

Lichtenberg is a grim, bleak dystopian tale that keeps the reader interested throughout, because it always maintains a flicker of hope throughout the novel.  For the readers out there that enjoyed books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this should be a perfect read.   The book is written in the present tense from the perspective of Riven, a soldier in the Corps, the group tasked with protecting the City of Raidon from the Ramasites. Raidon is one of the remaining bastions of civilization, and all inhabitants have one fear: that the Ramasites, humans trying to survive outside the city, will one day band together and destroy it.  No matter that none of the city’s inhabitants remember the time before whatever calamity happened, it’s just what they have been told, and it’s what the historical archives tell them.

The job of the Corps, a loosely disciplined army of troops that love violence, is simple: patrol the countryside, and kill anyone they find.  Men, women, children– all are a threat, and must be eliminated.   The plot centers on Riven, and the doubts he starts having with the validity of the mission of the Corps, which of course is its only reason for existence.  The narrative is really more about Riven and how he sees things.  That’s why the first-person present tense (a style I normally loathe) actually works for this book.  It lets the reader get into Riven’s head in an immersive and immediate way. A significant amount of the writing concerns Riven’s thoughts and feelings regarding the Corps and what they do.  It’s a fairly in-depth character study, and it is well done.  The story doesn’t provide any information from before Riven’s time, or after it, since he is the focal point of the story.  This is one of the few times I have read a book written in this style that actually works, since too many books written in the present tense come off like bad movie scripts.

This is not just a detailed psychological novel: there are plenty of things happening in the story, more than enough to keep the pages flipping.  The interactions between the Corps and Ramasites provide a good deal of the action, as well as some of the basis for Riven’s discontent.  There are violent gun battles that show the inhumanity of the Corps members, and some of the training that takes place inside the walls of Raidon helps explain how the soldiers became what they are.  When you are raised on violence, you are likely to do the same to others, as they demonstrate on the Ramasites.  It all builds to a very satisfying conclusion that hits with a bang, and Riven’s fate is quite dramatic: it would look incredible on the silver screen.  The only thing I didn’t understand was the brief epilogue chapter, The way the book ended before that was perfect as it was: open ended, but with hope for the future.   In closing, definitely a good one, and worth checking out. Recommended.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson