DonnaD

It was weird how the apocalypse snuck up on you. In the movies, there was always the one big event - the nuclear war, the virus infected monkey that bites the animal rights protester, whatever - and then everything goes to shit in the next 15 minutes. Reality wasn't like that, though. In the real world, things went to shit step by step by step, so slowly that you barely noticed, but then every now and then you look up and see it with fresh eyes, and wonder how the hell it got to be like this. At first the chance of the asteroid Mammon hitting was 1 in 1,000. Then 1 in 100. Then 1 in 10. For...

In 1916, Sven Ormson leaves a restless life in Stockholm to seek adventure in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where darkness reigns four months of the year and he might witness the splendor of the Northern Lights one night and be attacked by a polar bear the next. But his time as a miner ends when an avalanche nearly kills him, leaving him disfigured, and Sven flees even further, to an uninhabited fjord. There, with the company of a loyal dog, he builds a hut and lives alone, testing himself against the elements.

At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.