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 for the Lamb of God is unreservedly recommended to fans of well-conceived apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.

John B Wells 11:11

@JohnBWellsCTM

In the post-apocalyptic world of "Hunting for the Lamb of God," author Jamey O'Donnell crafts a chilling and captivating tale that examines the moral choices individuals face when survival becomes their only concern. Set in a suburb south of Denver, Colorado, the story follows two neighboring families who must band together after America is struck by a super EMP, leaving food and water scarce. With desperation mounting, the families are faced with an unthinkable decision: whether to consume human flesh and, perhaps, take lives to do so. O'Donnell's attention to detail immerses readers in this hauntingly real dystopian nightmare. The world-building is masterfully executed, from the desolate streets to the encounters with other desperate survivors. One of the novel's greatest strengths lies in its exploration of the characters' moral compasses. As the families grapple with life-or-death choices, readers are compelled to consider their own beliefs and values. While "Hunting for the Lamb of God" contains graphic scenes and disturbing content, it offers a gripping portrayal of human nature's darkest aspects. A heart-pounding and thought-provoking journey, this book challenges readers to confront their deepest fears and ponder the boundaries of morality in desperate circumstances. It may not be an easy read, but its exploration of survival instincts and the lengths people go to stay alive is undeniably compelling. A great read. -JBW

HUNTING FOR THE LAMB OF GOD

BY JAMEY O'DONNELL ‧ RELEASE DATE: JULY 26, 2021

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.

Review of Hunting for the Lamb of God

• Quote

Post by Brett Linette » 04 Jan 2022, 08:40

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Hunting for the Lamb of God" by Jamey O'Donnell.]

3 out of 4 starsShare This Review

Hunting for the Lamb of God by Jamey O'Donnell is a novel about how many lives we'd take in order to save our own.

There's a blackout. This isn't just any kind of blackout. This is the kind of blackout that isn't going to be resolved the following day. It may not even be resolved the following year. More is powered by electricity than Mark stops to think about. How is the country going to produce food? What is everyone going to eat? In a world where Mark and his family have nothing but each other, will they eat one another or starve first?

The story opens with Brian playing a video game with his best friend. Brian is Mark's little brother. I don't think the author could've opened the story with a better scene. Knowing how abnormal the story gets, I couldn't help but find the normalcy of the opening scene unsettling. I felt that something could go wrong at any second. It was waiting for the inevitable that kept me on the edge of my seat. It happens sooner than later. It actually happens sooner than you'd think it would. I would've liked to sit in suspense for a little longer. The blackout is exciting. The root of it is boring. It doesn't help that the author goes on about it for pages.

Mark's father always had a feeling that something like this would happen; this is why he had a bunker made into the ground of their backyard. It's in this bunker that Mark comes across a handful of flashlights. I understand him giving a flashlight to his mother. What I don't understand is why he gives a flashlight to everyone in sight. One flashlight per room is one thing, but one flashlight per person in the room is ridiculous. How are they going to preserve their resources when they're squandering them? I'm glad that his father wasn't there to see that; the sight of them "throwing away" everything that he had accumulated for them would've killed him faster than the crisis that they were in.

While the characters don't know what's going on, it's made clear to us, the readers, that a foreign country is to blame for the blackout. I wish the countries in this story weren't actual countries. I hate stories that pin actual countries against each other. I understand that some countries really are at war with one another, but the idea of one country going as far as to take the livelihood of another country is just something that I don't want to imagine. I know that this is only a story, but because it takes place in the future, it reads more like a theory. I don't want to accuse the author of being judgemental, but villainizing countries that have been villainized in the past is rather stereotypical.

The dialogue is diverse. Each character has a distinctive way of speaking. Mark uses foul language. His mother, on the other hand, does not. The author has a way of describing certain things about the setting but not others. He does a great job of describing the structure of the bunker. He informs us of the width of the floor and the length of the walls. It's just that I would rather have heard more about what was inside of the bunker. It takes the author a minute to get to that.

All things considered, I rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. As interesting as the story is, it reads like a news report. A lot of the degradation of the country is reported rather than depicted. I'd recommend this book to those who enjoy reading about an explosion down to the spark of it. I like a good explosion. I just don't care for the mechanics of it. It's worth noting that this book only consists of one typo. It's in the beginning of the book. The rest of the book is error-free.

******
Hunting for the Lamb of God

Writer and deep thinker Jamey O’Donnell has constructed a twisting, terrifying scenario – a world gone insane after the obliteration of electromagnetic power in his book Hunting for the Lamb of God. This “end times” speculation combines the best of human hopes and the worst of human failings.

Carefully plotted by Iran in tandem with North Korea, the attack on the Western hemisphere is harrowingly, immediately effective – three bright flashes of light are followed by the death of all electronic devices, resulting in jetliners crashing, cars wrecking, houses set ablaze, and a chaos so total that no one could have imagined it. The book’s main characters, two neighbor boys named Jack and Mark, begin to share in the terror that grips their world, realizing how truly bad it is when Mark’s car won’t start, and then, on foot, trying to help the victims of a nearby plane crash. Mark’s father Bill, a prepper of sorts, had built an underground shelter and supplied it with dried foods and numerous flashlights, even a ham radio. Once the two boys start to figure out their means to survival, they will watch after their younger siblings, Jack’s invalid mother and Mark’s mom Liv, who is trying to be brave though Bill is far away from home, working in Washington, DC. When Bill returns, it is to take them back to DC to continue using his expertise to ameliorate the crisis. But he will refuse the government’s offer of safety when his neighbors are not allowed to accompany them – thus is born a new alliance in which the two families will face and withstand the ugly new world together, fleeing – slowly, on foot and with laden shopping carts – to the wilderness. This is happening even as in some US cities, huge percentages of the population have been wiped out, and those that remain are resorting to cannibalism. Once ensconced in a tiny commune that calls itself New Hope, building shelters and planning for survival, the families will begin to see the deterioration of mankind’s morality play out, even in what they believed was a safe haven.

O’Donnell, who lives in Colorado where most of his story is set, is a student of national and world politics, and brings to this eerie tale certain political and social constructs that express his viewpoint. His book flies by, with action and reaction on every page. He shows the reader the innate compassion with which some humans seem naturally endowed, and the hate and ignorance of others. The scenarios depicted seem, as he has organized them, quite logical, though cold and truly frightening. How would ordinary Americans react in such a widespread crisis? There is a frisson of Biblical prophecy interlaced in the story, with the two families being devout Christians who take comfort in prayer. The book’s ending begs a sequel, and the author will surely not disappoint his readership in that regard. O’Donnell’s Hunting for the Lamb of God, with its title’s ironic hinting at the story’s unsettling plotlines, presents a rare, almost plausible dystopia for thoughtful readers to contemplate, with an accompanying shiver.

Loved it! 😍

An amazing read that everyone should read at least once. It's impossible to put the book down once you start.

SYNOPSIS

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.

This book attracted me with its odd title and book cover. On one hand, there is a cross and the title says Hunting for The Lamb of God. But when the Lamb of God has been slain, how can you hunt for Him? I had many questions circling in my head about the plot of the story and what it would entail. The blurb of the book does not even closely let you in on how deep the book is.

Having read The Lord of the Flies, I was a little skeptical about this book. The Lord of the Flies had left me sick to my guts. It was a book that tore me apart. The loss of innocence and the brutality sneaks up on you and rips you apart. This book is set completely in the US. The story revolves around two families: the Jenkins and the Price families. Life was normal with everyone getting on with their lives. This was until the US was is hit with EMP (Electromagnetic pulse). The EMP hit the US so badly that it shut down the country completely. Vehicles died in the middle of the street, elevators were stuck across the country, gadgets were not working, phones were dead, etc. The horrific details of the story are gelled well together in a fictional story combined with a dystopian nightmare. The scary fact is that this fiction can be a near possibility with the way things have turned out to be.

With the story progressing, each family and each person begins to develop. The children lose their innocence and mature fast. The elder boys become men overnight. They see their mothers escape being raped and fight off cannibals. Society runs amok with cannibals looking for their next meal. The silver lining to the cloud though is that the family grows in their faith and care for each another, looking after one another's back. They were not prepared for what lay before them. Neighbors dead, food stock decreasing, the inability to contact others or to enquire about their welfare. What helps them withstand all the barbarity and savagery is their love for each other and also the hope for a new life. It's a tough game of survival, where everyone is pitted against each other, vying for the resources the other has.

One can only half imagine the horror if such a thing were ever to happen. It is an almost apocalyptic tale, yet one that holds hope, portraying plenty of survival skills. It will make you flip pages with bated breath.

The book is a masterpiece but the cliffhanger is a killer, not knowing what will happen to the families. I'm now eagerly waiting for the sequel to come to find out what happens to the families. I recommend this book to everyone.

I received an ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review. My views are not biased towards the author or the publisher.

Hunting for the Lamb of God by Jamey O'Donnell is a spellbinding post-apocalyptic novel that will surely shake readers out of stupor and make them think about what happens in times of crisis. The novel examines how people behave when the social fabric is shattered and existence becomes a struggle for survival. May 24, 2022, three nuclear explosions cripple the United States. The explosions create a powerful electromagnetic pulse and the effects are devastating. The Northern Hemisphere is suddenly thrust into darkness, with satellites disabled. In the aftermath of the devastation, two neighboring families struggle to survive amidst food shortages and lack of necessities. The Jenkins and Price families have lived a normal life, loving and caring for each other while growing in faith. When explosions shatter everything, they have nothing left but their faith and the will to survive. In a world where humans hunt other humans for food, can they make it until the next day?

While Hunting for the Lamb features strong dystopian elements, it beats many books readers will find in the genre because of its resonant themes. The author offers strong political and social commentaries, exploring the relationship between the United States and Iran. The story is a cautionary tale that warns readers about what can possible happen where the race to the buildup of nuclear power takes center stage in international politics. The characters in this novel are fully drawn and it is interesting to watch as they evolve through the crisis. Themes of family, survival, politics, and faith are cleverly explored in this pulsating tale. The narrative features intriguing details and the author explores human strength and fragility when faced with impending annihilation. The exploration of what people can do to survive dominates the story.  Few authors succeed to capture the essence of post-apocalyptic fantasy the way Jamey O'Donnell does, and his book offers the perfect meld of fully realized characters — with their humanity, resilience, and faith — suspense, and realism. This tale is original, intriguing, and one of those few stories that haunt readers in their sleep.

Hunting for the Lamb of God /by Author Jamey O’Donnell

Hunting for the Lamb of God is a story of two families who come together during an apocalypse caused by a super electromagnetic pulse that stops every electrical device from working and sends the American nation spiralling into complete anarchy. It is not long before food, water and essential supplies run out leaving those that have survived the already devastating effects of the EMP to take more drastic measures and turn to cannibalism. The two families living across the street from each other must decide how far they are willing to go to survive, where they draw the line, and how they avoid becoming someone’s next meal. The families keep hold of their faith in God, even when all hope seems to have gone, that he will help them to stay alive during the months ahead as America tries to recover itself and resume law & order once again.

This is a really interesting and thought provoking plot that offers plenty of realism, drama, tension and suspense as readers are taken on an emotional rollercoaster ride from start to finish. The story moves at a great pace, and is extremely engaging. Readers will find it very easy to build an emotional connection to the majority of the characters, particularly the two boys, Mark and Jack and Mark’s mother, Viv, understanding and accepting the lengths that they have to go to in order to protect their family. Overall this is well written, with the odd editorial issue creeping in, but this can easily be addressed by the Author and in no way distracts from the enjoyment of the book.

The ending of the book is left open ended suggesting that there is a sequel to come.

I therefore award 5 stars.

"It was at that moment that the world took a quantum leap backward and nothing would ever be the same."

In this dystopian tale, the West finds itself crippled when North Korea and Iran join forces to attack with "three nuclear explosions strategically positioned over the United States, designed to create a super electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and cripple the U.S." This attack effectively stops all electronically powered equipment from working. There are no computers, cars, phones, or communications, "and 3200 jet airliners began to fall from the sky over America, Canada, and Mexico." Those alive after the initial event must now find a way to survive its effects. As people begin to starve because of the inability to produce and store food, they turn to a ready food source—humans. Cannibalism runs rampant, with gangs attacking homes to procure food. But not all people wish to survive through the eating of human flesh. Is it possible to carve out a life among those who would readily kill another human for food?

O'Donnell carves out a futuristic horror story as he sets up this devastating scenario of a crippling blow to the West. It isn't hard to imagine a world where the United States is attacked and left without power or resources, but a world that so easily turns to cannibalism is truly frightening. There is much internal struggle and dramatic tension as two sets of neighbors try to navigate the landscape of this strange new world, relying only on themselves with no coordinated emergency government assistance. The author does a fantastic job of setting up the conflict and building tension as his characters try to find a way to survive. This well-written, though disturbing, story gives readers much to contemplate.