Steven Konkoly built five books on the premise that collapse arrives in stages rather than all at once. A pandemic first, then an attack on the national infrastructure, then the slow administrative horror of what a government does about the wreckage afterward. The entire Perseid Collapse run is gathered into this audiobook, forty-nine hours and fifty-five minutes of it, read by John David Farrell for Stribling Media and on sale since January 2018. The page selling it cannot count.
The Review
Book one, The Jakarta Pandemic, opens on Alex Fletcher, an Iraq War veteran who has been reading the warning signs for years and has his family and his house prepared for a long seclusion. He is wrong about being ready, and the virus turns out to be the least of his problems. The Perseid Collapse jumps to an attack on American infrastructure and a landscape gone hostile overnight; Event Horizon puts him inside a collapsing Boston; Point of Crisis moves him into a federal recovery zone he stops trusting; Dispatches widens the frame to a world coming apart.
JustSomeGuyWhoLovesTech, at five stars in September 2018, calls the Perseid Collapse one of the best series read in a long, long time, and that account has a lot to compare against: many books a month across science fiction, adventure, fantasy, religion, history and biography. The image it reaches for is the useful one, reading under a blanket with a flashlight after being sent to bed. That is the register these books aim at, and sustaining it across five volumes is not a small achievement.
Now the arithmetic problem. The page reports two ratings and a 4.5 average, while five separate people have left signed responses carrying star values of five, four, five, five and four. Two cannot contain five. Either the tally counts something narrower than the written pool, or it is simply broken, and in either case the average sitting on top of it describes a sample smaller than the evidence printed directly underneath it. Read the responses and ignore the number.
What Makes Alex Fletcher Boxset, Complete Series: Books 1-5 Worth Hearing
Wan Stewart's five-star account from May 2024 delivers the best recommendation and the most concrete warning in the same paragraph: non-stop action, description dense enough that you feel positioned inside it, and the observation that the writing lets you hear the thoughts of characters from every angle of a given argument. Then comes the practical note. That account advises against taking this series to bed, on the grounds that you will dream about combat afterward. Believe it.
Multiple viewpoints are the structural reason the run holds together. A collapse story told from one perspective becomes a survival diary; told from several, it becomes an argument about what people owe each other once the rules stop applying. Konkoly uses that to turn the militia commanders, the federal administrators and the neighbors at the lake community into positions rather than obstacles, which is why the fourth book's premise, a recovery zone run by a government Fletcher starts to doubt, is the most promising of the five on paper.
Fifty hours in a single purchase is a serious proposition, and it is the right shape for this particular material. Collapse narratives need duration to function, because the whole point is that things degrade slowly and then suddenly, and a standalone novel cannot show you the slowly. Buying all five together also removes the decision points where series fatigue normally kills a run, since the next book simply starts without pausing to ask whether you want it to.
Things to Know Before Starting Alex Fletcher Boxset, Complete Series: Books 1-5
Four stars from April 2019 carries the most honest assessment on the page. It reports clear problems with dialogue and pacing early in the first book, then credits Konkoly with growing as an author in front of you across the run. It also does the content-advisory work the publisher skipped: no explicit sex, no anatomical description anywhere across the series, and gratuitous language confined to the final book and the wrap-up novella at the end.
Stop on that last phrase for a moment. The product is titled Complete Series: Books 1-5, and somebody who went through the whole thing describes a wrap-up novella sitting after the fifth book. Whether this recording contains it, the page never says. The series entries are blank as well, both name and number, on a product whose entire proposition is that it collects a named sequence in order. The description supplies the name, The Perseid Collapse. The catalog leaves the space empty.
All five written accounts describe reading. Turning pages, a five-pack boxed set, a flashlight under the blankets, intense reading, and a caution against reading this at bedtime: five for five, with no exceptions. What the pool assesses, then, is Konkoly on the page. The shelving is off too, filing a run the copy itself calls post-apocalyptic thriller action and suspense under science fiction and fantasy, which will attract the wrong readers and miss the right ones.
Who It's For
Preparedness fiction has its own devoted audience and this aims squarely at it. A September 2019 five-star account names the appeal precisely: technical story lines, unpredictable turns, quick movement, and strong women among the cast, with an explicit recommendation for anybody who likes military or dystopian writing. Add a protagonist whose competence is established in book one and then proves repeatedly insufficient, which is the tension the whole sequence runs on.
Speed is not what this offers, so be careful if speed is what you want. The pleasure here is procedural: supply inventories, defensive perimeters, chains of command, the specific arithmetic of feeding people who cannot feed themselves. Anybody sensitive to sustained combat and home invasion should weigh that against a very long commitment, because this is not background listening. And the technical register never lets up, so if gear and tactics leave you cold, five books is a great deal of gear and tactics.
Konkoly's real subject is not the disaster itself. It is the administration that follows one: who claims authority, who gets fed, which promises survive once the food starts running low. Five books is exactly the right length for that argument, and a listing that cannot say how many people rated it, or even what the series is called, does the work underneath a real disservice.
- Narrator: John David Farrell holds a single credit across all five novels, on material that switches viewpoint constantly between soldiers, administrators and frightened neighbors.
- Subjects: Pandemic and infrastructure collapse, prepper competence tested past its limits, federal authority nobody quite trusts.
- Tone: Relentless, technical, genuinely unnerving after dark.
- Bottom line: A well-built collapse sequence let down by a catalog entry that contradicts its own evidence.
Does the audiobook resolve all of its plot threads by the end?
Not entirely. A four-star response from December 2019 reports a few main backstory threads running through books two to five that never get closed, and describes the result as slightly unsatisfying. The same account rates the five-pack format itself highly as a way of following the sequence in order.
Why is the series named after its second book?
Because it is. The description sells the whole run as the Perseid Collapse series while listing The Jakarta Pandemic as book one and The Perseid Collapse as book two. Anyone searching by series name will land on the second volume first, which is worth knowing before you buy anything separately.
How should a listener pace an audiobook this long?
Treat it as five purchases rather than one. The five novels average roughly ten hours each, so a book a week across a couple of months keeps the cast manageable and stops the technical detail blurring together. Nothing in the structure rewards attempting the whole thing in one stretch.
