Blurb:

Sickness plagues the United States. The economy goes into freefall as vast swaths of the US workforce—across all sectors—remain hospitalized.

The government soon decides that the most patriotic thing these terminally-ill Americans can do is die.

A serum is developed, and Congress quickly ratifies the National Health and Productivity Act, enforced by Officers of the Federal Bureau of Prosperity.

Citizens with terminal illnesses are now on the front line of America’s next war: a battle to prevent the complete collapse of the United States; and those that willingly take the serum are soon simply known as: THE NEW PATRIOTS.

Review:

To most people, the pandemic was a terrible thing, but after reading The New Patriots by Jake Theriault, it clearly could have been much worse. This story has terrifying implications that I find are not far-fetched in this day and age, which is why I could not put this story down. I wanted to know how it ended, if only to make sure that we ought not trick ourselves into suffering the same fate.

But wait, what am I even talking about? Well, in Theriault’s The New Patriots, a disease has spread across the US, and rather than treat it, corporations, the government, and anybody else with a modicum of power and no sliver of sanity, has decided that it would be far easier to kill these people. The catch? Actually, there is none, they just die. They’re branded New Patriots, saviours to the American cause, so that precious resources might not be wasted. The justification lies in the fact that the disease was so destructive, it nearly toppled the world economy, and so this was the best option. Seriously.

Our main character is your average Joe (that’s not his name, just for clarity), who goes about administering a serum to the terminally ill to make them New Patriots. His wife is too, and they live normal lives, going about their jobs, dreaming of the future together. But along the way, one of the MC’s patients gets a bit philosophical, and soon the MC is asking questions; about himself, his job, and the very state of the world. His answers are… horrifying, and he finds them irreconcilable. What that means you’ll just have to find out for yourself.

For me, this represented an alternate, but entirely possible, USA post-COVID, which is not something I say lightly or am proud of in the slightest. The best part? Theriault wrote this PRE-pandemic. I’ve joked with him before that he should write for the Simpsons, but seriously, the fact that he wrote this story before any of the COVID stuff happened is crazy, and is justification for reading in and of itself. Another justification is that it’s just so dang good, from the prose, to the buildup. In so small a page count, he really does a great job of bringing things together and wrapping it up nicely. And what’s more, the ending was both unexpected yet made a lot of sense in the best of ways, which is something I’m a big fan of in the books I read.

This was a relatively short, but sweet, novel, and I wish it was longer if only to see how the story panned out afterwards, but hey, isn’t that a mark for good storytelling? If you’re into contemporary fiction, alternate timelines, and just downright terrifying implications, I implore you to pick up a copy of The New Patriots by Jake Theriault when it finally releases.