This was such a dour and twisted read. I still can't decide if I loved or hated it. I couldn't stop reading, so take from that what you will. It was terrifying in its intensity, and overall thoroughly depressing. Since I'm fairly certain that was the point, the author hit the nail on the head.

The general openness of it left so much to the imagination, making me actually relate more to the characters. The reader knows only as much as the narrator, and that feeling was intense. I'm not sure I'd slug through it again, but it's maybe one of those everyone should give a try.

Amazing! It's a book that I will buy to keep in my own personal library. Anyone who likes old pulp novels and/or dystonia will enjoy this book.

'Lot and Lot's Daughter' by Ward Moore is a collection of two stories written during the 1950s. Unlike most "prepper" fiction today, I think it paints a pretty realistic view of how some might survive in the aftermath of disaster.

In Lot, Mr. Jimmon has been preparing for the day when disaster will hit. He's been stockpiling and planning his escape route and even where he thinks he can ride out the catastrophe. When it finally hits (and the beginning of the story), the family hits the road. The problem is that everyone else does too. Also, his family wants to delay his escape with their biological needs. Finally, in a calculated move, Mr. Jimmon does what he thinks he must to ensure his survival.

In Lot's Daughter, it is now years later and Mr. Jimmon in encamped with his daughter and a young boy. He forages for food, mostly unsuccessfully, while his daughter stays in camp and does the bulk of the work. As things fall apart, we see that Mr. Jimmon is not really all that prepared for this future after all.

There is an introduction by Michael Swanwick and a short bio at the end of the author, including pictures.

Mr. Jimmon is never a likable protagonist, in my opinion, but these are good stories of the dream of survival versus the reality. I am glad I got the chance to read these stories.

I received a review copy of this ebook from Open Road Integrated Media and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.

It seems a little obvious to state that this brace of stories featuring a man and his family fleeing imminent nuclear attack is dated, but it is - and not just because the Cold War threat has of course mostly died away. No, they've dated because they twice or thrice relate to sex matters as part of the plot, and every time they're too obvious and guessable, especially when the first was so blatant and unsubtle and after that we're primed for the others. Beyond the predictability that must count as flaws these days comes the slightly unlikeable style, all internal thought and belligerence and told-you-so-ness. I know that's here for character, but it doesn't make the stories that brilliantly loveable. They're just decent postcards from a time when survivalist intent didn't really match up to what was best for mankind.

First published as short stories in 1953 & 1954; published by Open Road Media on June 6, 2017

Ward Moore was far from prolific, but some of the science fiction he generated has achieved classic status. The short story “Lot” (1953) and its sequel “Lot’s Daughter” (1954) certainly deserve to be enjoyed by each new generation of sf fans.

“Lot” is the perfect antidote to all of the loathsome prepper porn and self-published survivalist literature that has become so popular with a certain segment of society. Moore seems to have anticipated the genre and savaged it before it was born.

The Jimmon family, car packed full of essentials, no room for the dog, flees Malibu, along with countless others who are heading north from the LA area. David Jimmon is pretty pleased with himself because he put his own selfish interests ahead of those of his neighbors and, for that matter, his family by pushing ahead of the pack on the crowded highways. He views himself as a romantic hero, the individualist who survives while the docile masses perish. His family views him as a tyrant who has gone off the deep end.

David is enormously frustrated with his wife and kids, who (in his view) don’t understand the enormity of the war that has destroyed LA and Pittsburgh, inevitably leading (he believes) to primal battles among the survivors as they try to steal food, weapons, and women from each other. David’s family, on the other hand, is fed up with his “there is no law but the law of survival” attitude. When his son brightly asks if it is now okay to steal cars, only David's wife seems to understand that the breakdown of society is a choice, not an imperative.

The war, and the chance it gives him to show off his planning skills, is the only thing that has gone right in a life as a buttoned-down accountant that is primarily defined by David’s insecurity. But the story’s payoff comes in just how far David is willing to go to bring about his vision of a brighter survivalist future.

“Lot’s Daughter” takes place several years later. David is still awash in the constructs of his antisocial mind. His daughter, who believes that humans have an instinct for cooperation, clearly did not inherit her father’s craziness gene. All of David’s survivalist preparations reveal his ineptness at pretty much everything. He is much better at theorizing how to survive than at acquiring the practical skills that might allow him to thrive.

Both “Lot” and “Lot’s Daughter” involve a shock. In “Lot’s Daughter,” the shock arrives when it the reader realizes just what a hypocritical dirtbag David really is. Both stories excel at giving the reader just enough information to appreciate the themes while allowing the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps.

The quality of Moore’s prose and the depth of his thought set "Lot" and "Lot’s Daughter" apart from most modern post-apocalyptic fiction. The stories are small and personal but they hold up a mirror to an outsized, vocal segment of society that, I’m sure, would be just as useless in a crisis at David proves to be. The second story drips with irony, a perfect counterpart to the first, but both stories illustrate the consequences of a misguided philosophy, an eagerness to abandon civilization, that is just as prevalent today as it was when Moore created David Jimmon.

"Lot" deals with David Jimmon, a Los Angeles suburbanite whose car is packed to the gills like a mockery of a camping vacation, as he prepares for the long crawl along a freeway full of motorists hoping to flee the atomic blasts raining down on American cities. Jimmon gloats over his preparedness, mentally chiding his family---two obnoxious sons, a naive wife, and dutiful daughter Erika---for their lack of vision. For you see, unlike his family, Jimmon has realized that this is the end of civilization, that they are now on their own, that bridge nights and grocery stores and teenage dating drama has now been replaced by icy survivalism. Only Jimmon realizes how cutthroat this new world is, and how callous his family must become to survive in it.

Therein lies the crux of "Lot," which isn't the icy libertarian power-fantasy you'd expect; instead, it's a portrait of the meek family man full of middle-age (and middle-class) resentments now loosed upon the wilds, a broken individual unrestrained by the flimsy pretenses of civilization or law. Jimmon's hatred---of his neighbors, his pet, his wife's former lover, and most of all his "parasitic" family leeching off his preparedness---becomes his driving passion, and his anger builds as the Civil Defense broadcasts fill the background with vague and static-y propaganda reports. By the end, Jimmon has decided that there is only one choice he can make to survive this apocalypse, resolutely heading for the hills while his family stares back at their past lives as fiery destruction rains down on LA like the wrath falling upon Sodom. And without hesitation, without compassion, without caring, he makes that choice.

After "Lot" ends on a vivid but open-ended note, "Lot's Daughter" takes the story setup to its logical conclusion. An aging Jimmon and Erika eke out a living in the lonely wilds, surviving by living off the lands and hoarding their suppliers. Jimmon's icy brand of survivalism is starting to wear on him: the pair entered what's implied to be an incestuous relationship (evident by a young boy without any father-figure but Jimmon), but now the child and ailing Jimmon are becoming burdensome on a healthy and hale Erika. She doesn't wish to carry their weight any longer, and while Jimmon is off fishing, scavenging, and reflecting upon civilization, he finds himself getting precisely what he asked for, dead weight for a more capable daughter. He reaps what he has sown, finding out too late that some mercies and communal safety-nets might not be bad things after all...

These two novellas are bleak and shocking, and I'm kind of surprised Moore was able to push these limits in the artsy-but-mainstream F&SF, more of an upmarket publication in newsstands still dominated by the lurid and dying pulps. Jimmon's tough choices, and the bleakness of tone and character, remind me of Wilson Tucker's brutal Long Loud Silence, and those few who've read it know what I mean: these are gloriously hard-hitting novels that deconstruct the kind of power fantasies that post-apocalyptic lit tends to generate, offering a bleak, pessimistic forecast for the kind of person who gleefully looks forward to the apocalypse as "my time to shine." These two stories are short but potent, notable entries in the realm of post-apoc lit, and I recommend them highly to fans of 1950s SF.

Lot & Lot's Daughter by Ward Moore. Written in the early 1950's, this is a short book comprised of two stories with an introduction by Michael Swanwick. It centers around the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Los Angeles and focuses on one particular family and how they fare. The main character is David Jimmon or Mr. Jimmon, as he is usually referred to. Mr. Jimmon has planned for quite a while for an atomic war and is almost pleased to see his planning was not in vain. He grabs up his family and sets out on a trek in their station wagon, to get as far from civilization as possible. The first story is a road trip as they race up the coast to a destination he has already chosen. He has packed what he thinks are everything they need, but the response from his wife and children as they struggle across the clogged traffic lanes, leaves him disturbed and reproachful. They don't understand his urgency, or the necessity. Mr. Jimmon, however, prides himself as being a survivor and sometimes surviving means making tough choices. In the second story some half dozen years later, he and the remains of his family live in total isolation from the rest of the world, trying to eke out a ragged, impoverished living while staying hidden from their fellow man. In Michael Swanwick's introduction, he talks about the air raid drills, when he was a school boy, that was a real part of everyone preparing for nuclear war. I remember those drills myself, and I had friends whose parents build bomb shelters. It was a national paranoia that everyone felt. Ward Moore captures the feel of it here and with deft logic shows us how so many people fell under the spell of the inevitability of war. Amazingly, these stories appear only a few years after Hiroshima, showing how far ahead his thinking had gone. Of course, they are dated, but the brutal feeling of it is captured so well, making this a true classic.