Smoking Skillet

Grid Down Prepper Up series, Book 1

By: Ron Foster

Narrated by: T. David Rutherford

North Korea has a plan to take down the United States and deceive the whole world in the process of just how they are going to go about it.

A secret military plan code named “Smoking Skillet” is to be put into play to crush America and its allies' infrastructure and cause societal and economic collapse. A devilishly plausible scheme with lots of deniability built in is concocted by an alliance between the would be atomic powers of Iran and North Korea that ends up causing a nuclear exchange and lights out for much of the modern world.

A middle-aged prepper couple trying to settle a deceased relative’s estate out of town find themselves now facing an electrical grid down apocalypse far from home. They must try to survive this chaos with the help of a pair of elderly neighbors in a small town suburb. They are forced to bug out eventually and take to the road in hopes of getting to an old friend's vacation fish camp after a chance meeting with he and his wife in a militia run town.

The survivors of this apocalyptic tale use a variety of backyard survival tips and tricks to find food in their small neighborhood, but it isn’t enough and they grow weaker with starvation everyday.

©2017 Ron Foster (P)2018 Ron Foster

Believable Prepper Fiction

The narrator did a great job telling a story of intrigue and societal collapse based on Korea terrorism. Cyberwarfare has taken down the electrical grid!

While not for me, some preppers may like this

Introduction is hypotheticals about North Korea. Then story line about the electrical grid going down and the water systems failing.

Tips on trapping song birds. Not for me. I just look at how the Amish live and what my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents did to survive and "prosper" despite having to use outhouses, no toilet paper, no electricity. I do enjoy my refrigerator and fans, but I know how to hand wash clothes, heat water, grow and can my own food. If I had to, I could live without electricity. Kindergarten through high school, none of the schools I attended had air conditioning. When I first started working, the business offices did not have air conditioning. I grew up in a home without air conditioning. Our cars did not have air conditioning.

My cousin and my grandfather did not hunt squirrels or song birds. They hunted rabbits (more meat than a squirrel) and deer. My dad fished.

When my mother was growing up, she slept on an unheated porch, even in winter in Michigan. She and her mother both got chilblains in winter. I think most Americans do not even know what a chilblain is.

My maternal grandmother walked to school. In winter she had two pancakes wrapped around her hands as "mittens". She ate the pancakes for lunch, then put her hands in her coat pocket on the way home. She completed school through the 8th grade.

I do not know why, but it seems to me previous generations were mentally "tougher" than those alive today.

A family friend, who was like a second father to me, who was born in 1923, told me his mother boiled all their drinking water. They also boiled the milk from their cows. This gets rid of bacteria.

I only listened to about an hour of this story, because it seemed childish to me. People can live well without the modern conveniences, it just takes a lot of work (and some knowledge and skills). Considering the obesity rate in the USA and the unfortunate drug use, hard physical work would probably be a boon.

The premises of the book did not seem likely.