A Son of the Rock

The Mark by Nigel Envarli Crowe

This one is set in a town – in Russia or Ukraine judging by the characters’ names – mostly after a Chernobyl type accident at a nuclear reactor. (It can’t have been a nuclear explosion as, like at Chernobyl, there are survivors in the plant and town. It might even be meant to be Chernobyl itself.)

There are three viewpoint characters representing different generations of survivors and highlighting the deterioration of language and civilisation through time.

The Mark of the title is a growth on the throat, an outward sign of a mutation/adaptation which apparently confers protection from the residual radiation (quite how this works isn’t spelt out) but also brings with it a loss of intelligence.

The story is well enough written but I wasn’t convinced by it. The scenario is perhaps a bit too off the shelf – anywhere else apart from the former Soviet Union would have been more convincing. The explanation for language degradation came to late to salve my annoyance at its early appearance. There are also too many characters for a story with such a low word count. None of them has enough space to convince.