Sparrow Rock

Stoker-winner Kenyon shambles through postapocalyptic horror in this awkward mélange of teen angst drama and implausible post–nuclear war ecological terror. Pete, whose troubled past is revealed in a series of clichéd anecdotes, narrates the story of a small group of high school students who survive a sudden and largely unexplained catastrophic nuclear war thanks to what at first seems to be pure luck but later proves to be something darker. The teens soon realize that survival involves not just waiting out the radioactive fallout but overcoming the profound, possibly deliberate ecological changes it incurs, including undead rats and man-eating ants. Kenyon invokes science gone horribly wrong without stooping to mere plausibility, spicing his tale with a secret all-powerful crypto-fascist conspiracy spanning generations. The result is a serviceable game of Last Man Standing, played out with a cast of forgettable stock characters. (May)