Summary
The story takes place following a nuclear holocaust which wipes out every major city east of the Mississippi and leaves the survivors permanently infected with plague. To prevent the plague from spreading, the army sets up a cordon sanitaire along the Mississippi. The story follows one survivor, Russell Gary, as he attempts to get back across the river.
Review
Review by Anonymous, at Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased, Jan 2013
For his thirtieth birthday, celebrating ten years in the army, Corporal Russell Gary goes on a lengthy bender. When he awakes, he finds the entire eastern United States bombed and be-plagued by an unknown enemy—Chicago and his army base aglow in nuclear fire, the countryside filled with those killed by biological warfare. The Army has drawn the line at the Mississippi River: those on the eastern side are under strict quarantine, while those on the western side are under martial law, protected by armed guards with shoot-to-kill orders. Trying to keep the plague contained, the survivors—immune, but carriers of disease, Typhoid Marys all—are stranded on the far side of the river, cut off from the rest of the world.
Gary’s first instincts are to return to the army and get back to duty, but when he realizes how impossible that is, he sets out to survive in the dying wasteland. As food and supplies dwindle, it becomes more and more apparent that the quarantine is not temporary, and that survival will only become harder. The thousands of survivors are thinned by starvation and roving gangs of anarchistic looters; civilization’s last vestiges erode, trust vanishes, and what’s left are a hardened batch of starving degenerates. Gary’s hope for survival lies in somehow sneaking across the river and getting into the secure Western states, a task made harder by media propaganda declaring that all Americans east of the river are dead, and all that remains are “enemy agents”—the same starving citizens who are shot down in their attempts to cross the few remaining bridges.
For a 1950s novel, this one felt genuinely mature—by which I mean it tackles some very grim and shocking subject matter: it deals with sex (and polygamy), the protagonist’s slowly eroding morals, cannibalism, the United States essentially cutting loose the survivors in the East. Tucker was ahead of his time, offering a serious contemplation of the situation—Mike White claimed The Long Loud Silence is the The Road of the 1950s, and it’s entirely accurate. No bug-eyed aliens or super scientists here, just the dry cynicism of Gary’s survival in a brutal environment. The novel’s overall tone is very bleak; Tucker’s depiction of a broken United States and the eastern half’s downward spiral is deliciously depressing. The post-apocalyptic genre is not a pleasant one, dealing with large swaths of the populace dying off and the survivors turning to anything from fascism to marauding gangs, but The Long Loud Silence makes the other ’50s post-apocalypses I’ve read look light and cheery by comparison.”
Read the full review at Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased
The End and After 