I have been writing preparedness content for a long time now and I read a lot of fiction in this space, partly because I enjoy it and partly because I am always curious how other writers handle the practical details that I care about deeply. The details matter to me. When a novel gets the survival stuff wrong I notice it and it pulls me out of the story every time.
Matt Hill gets it right.
Matt is a friend of mine and he has written a novel called Covenant Mountain that I finished in two sittings because I could not put it down and I want to tell you about it because I think the people who read The Preparedness Post are exactly the people who will appreciate what he has done here.
The setup is this. One EMP pulse and every light on earth goes out and does not come back. Nathan is twenty eight years old with a lever gun and a forty five and a survival pack he spent years building. Jacqui is twenty seven, Orthodox Christian, and has lost everything she loves in a single morning. They have never met. They are climbing opposite sides of the same mountain.
What Matt does that most survival fiction does not do is render the practical details without compromise and without shortcuts. Processing a downed deer in a mountain snowstorm. Building fire and shelter from timber and stone. Curing meat. Foraging plants that actually heal and feed in a Rocky Mountain environment. Reading terrain and weather the way people used to read everything before the grid made that knowledge optional. I read those passages the way I read good technical writing, with genuine respect for someone who has done the homework and is not faking it.
But the survival detail is not the reason this book stayed with me.
The reason it stayed with me is the faith element. Jacqui is Orthodox Christian and her faith is not window dressing. It is the way she sees the world, the lens through which she understands beauty and suffering and what makes a life worth fighting for. I am a Protestant man who reads the King James Bible and Jacqui's tradition is different from mine, but the depth is recognizable and the authenticity is undeniable and I found myself thinking about things I had not thought about in a while because of the way Matt handles it.
There is a love story in here too and it earns every single moment, built on distrust and shared hardship and genuine respect in a way that romance in this genre almost never manages.
Then the wolves come. Then the grizzly comes down off the ridge. Then the people with the silver stars come up from the valley.
I am not going to tell you more than that.
Book one is here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GNLLRK3Q?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tkin_0&storeType=ebooks&qid=1774364789&sr=1-1
Book two is here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GT4L47SN?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tkin_1&storeType=ebooks&qid=1774364789&sr=1-1
Start with book one. Clear your Saturday.