Aaron Ryan has done it again. The maestro of post-apocalyptic alien invasion thrillers has delivered a tour-de-force prequel with Dissonance Volume Zero: Revelation that not only lives up to the pulse-pounding intensity of the original Dissonance trilogy, but adds rich new layers of depth, pathos and existential terror to an already unforgettable universe. Strap in, dear reader – you’re in for the ride of your life.
Setting the Stage
For the uninitiated, Ryan’s bestselling Dissonance saga began with Volume I: Reality, introducing us to a ravaged Earth in the year 2042, sixteen years after a mysterious and terrifying alien race known as the gorgons laid waste to human civilization. In that first book, we met haunted hero Cameron “Jet” Shipley, a young soldier on the frontlines of humanity’s last stand against the pitiless gorgon onslaught. Battling not only the alien menace but his own demons of grief and shattered faith in the very institutions meant to protect mankind, Jet’s anguished journey became the stuff of science fiction legend.
Subsequent volumes Reckoning and Renegade upped the ante considerably, thrusting Jet and his ragtag band of resistance fighters into a desperate guerrilla war against not only the gorgons themselves, but the tyrannical human leadership that threatened to be every bit as soulless as the alien invaders. As Jet struggled to lead the survivors to salvation, he was forced again and again to confront unthinkable horrors and grapple with profound questions about the nature of human identity, morality and our capacity for resilience in the face of annihilation.
Now, with Revelation, Ryan takes us back to where it all began – the fateful arrival of the gorgons on June 6th, 2026 and the cataclysmic first assault that brought humankind to its knees practically overnight. More than just a gripping origin story, Revelation serves as a spiritual prequel, plumbing the formative backgrounds and relationships that defined Jet and his family before the world burned. If the original Dissonance trilogy was about the struggle to maintain our humanity amidst unspeakable chaos, then Revelation is about cherishing the very things that make us human in the first place – and reckoning with the costs of having it all ripped away.
The Bonds of Family
We meet a very different Andrew Shipley as our protagonist this time around—not yet the grizzled, emotionally hardened survivor Jet, but an ordinary family man and firefighter utterly devoted to his wife Melissa and three children, Cameron, Rutledge and Sissy. Through lushly written domestic vignettes and tender character moments, Ryan paints an achingly relatable portrait of a loving nuclear family savoring the small joys and familiar rhythms of everyday life. The Shipley household practically leaps off the page, brimming with boisterous kids’ hijinks, marital banter, and even the occasional eye-rolling “dad joke” from Andrew himself.
It’s a masterful gambit, immediately endearing us to the Shipleys and investing us in the petty squabbles and mundane pleasures that make up the fabric of their existence. So when the gorgons’ arrival irrevocably shatters that tranquility, the impact is viscerally devastating. With each successive loss the Shipleys are forced to endure – dear friends, their loyal dog, their very home—we feel the mounting existential dread and despair as if it were our own.
This is Ryan’s special alchemy, the secret ingredient that elevates his storytelling above mere genre spectacle. He has always understood that the key to a great apocalyptic thriller lies not in the razzle-dazzle of the cataclysm itself, but in the beating human heart caught in the crosshairs. Before the gorgons’ reign of terror even begins, Ryan has already masterfully primed us to ache for this family, to yearn for their survival against all odds. By the time tragedy rips the Shipleys asunder, we are so immersed in their emotional ecosystem that every loss carries the weight of a psychological gut punch.
A Slow-Burn Apocalypse
Another of Ryan’s most potent storytelling weapons is his gift for the slow burn, the gradual, nerve-fraying escalation of an extinction-level threat. While it would have been easy to simply open Revelation with the gorgons’ assault already in full, city-leveling swing, Ryan instead opts for a far more unsettling approach. When the aliens first appear, hovering silently and seemingly benignly in the skies, they are less an immediate existential threat than a looming unknown, an inscrutable Sword of Damocles hanging over the world’s collective psyche.
Ryan wrings delicious, unbearable tension from the gorgons’ initial inscrutability, the sinking realization that their presence is not a brief cosmic pit stop, but an open-ended and increasingly ominous occupation. With each strange new development—fluctuating temperatures, disrupted communications, alarming animal behaviors—the author ratchets up the queasy sense of reality spiraling out of mankind’s tenuous grasp. Through the eyes of the Shipleys and their fellow townsfolk, we experience the dreadful, slow-motion unraveling of everything once taken for granted.
Of course, Ryan is still a maestro of go-for-broke action and suspense, and when the gorgons’ sinister intentions are finally revealed, Revelation detonates into a blistering, cinematically vivid spectacle of city-wide pandemonium and terror. Few authors can rival Ryan’s gift for placing readers in the visceral thick of the mayhem, with each frantic chase sequence and wrenching loss rendered in intimate, you-are-there detail. As the Shipleys are scattered to the winds and forced to rely on the kindness of near-strangers for survival, the book takes on an eerie, despairing tenor, the world now impossibly hostile and devoid of sanctuary.
Yet for all the brilliantly staged bedlam and alien grotesquerie, Revelation remains anchored in the deeply personal story of one family caught on the bleeding edge of the apocalypse. We bear witness to Melissa’s harrowing flight, Cameron’s shell-shocked helplessness, Andrew’s panicked thoughts of his distant parents, Sissy’s innocent incomprehension. It’s that ground-level intimacy of storytelling that sears the gorgons’ assault into our hearts and minds. Revelation’s unfolding cataclysm never feels less than harrowingly immediate, and horrifically relatable.
Hard-Hitting Themes
Longtime fans of the Dissonance saga will immediately recognize Revelation’s key thematic through-lines and philosophical undercurrents, but here they are given fresh, powerfully resonant dimension when married to the prequel’s more intimate scope. As the Shipleys watch their friends, neighbors, and fellow survivors succumb to the gorgons’ insidious attacks, we are confronted anew by the question of what moral responsibility we bear our fellow man when society collapses.
In one of the book’s most gut-wrenching scenes, Andrew is forced to deny sanctuary to his dearest friend in order to protect his own children – a split-second decision that continues to haunt him years later in the original trilogy. It’s an impossible zero-sum scenario with no clear right answer, a damned-if-you-do moral crucible that Ryan revisits again and again throughout Revelation to shattering effect. When the creatures attack, do we barricade the doors and save ourselves? Or do we risk everything to pull others from the flood?
This quandary takes on even more barbed dimensions through the character of Hudson, a near-stranger who risks his life to escort the Shipley family to precarious safety. When Hudson and his wife later sacrifice themselves to give the Shipleys a chance at escape, the debt of that selflessness hangs over the rest of the novel like a pall. For even in the midst of humanity’s darkest hour, Ryan seems to be arguing, we cannot afford to abandon the core decency and empathy that elevate us above the monstrous.
Flawed, achingly human characters facing impossible life-or-death choices with no clear right answer. Societies tearing themselves apart or banding together with renewed purpose in the face of an existential threat. The lingering ghosts of personal and ancestral trauma shaping our responses to unthinkable upheaval. These ideas have always pulsed through the marrow of Ryan’s Dissonance novels, but Revelation recasts them in an even more poignant, elementally striking light by focusing the end of the world through the lens of one relatable, flawed family.
An Impossible Cliffhanger
Of course, as readers of the Dissonance trilogy know all too well, Andrew Shipley’s story does not end with Revelation’s final, shattering pages—or at least, not his story alone. Anyone wondering how Ryan could possibly resolve Revelation’s brutal cliffhanger clearly hasn’t experienced the audacious narrative magic trick the author pulls off by dovetailing the prequel’s final moments with the opening bits of Dissonance Volume I: Reality.
The seamless, breathtakingly organic way Ryan folds Revelation’s denouement and themes into the trilogy’s established lore is nothing short of wizardry, immediately illuminating the later books in a brilliant new light while still standing tall as its own cohesive narrative. We now understand Sissy’s heartbreaking fate and Andrew’s tragic arc with newfound clarity, but have also borne witness to Cameron’s superhero origin story with a newfound appreciation for the scars he carries. Simply put, Ryan has deepened the power and resonance of his core saga by treating this prequel not as mere disposable backstory, but as the thematic load-bearing pillar that makes the entire mythology that much more sturdy, and emotionally articulate.
Final Thoughts
In Dissonance Volume Zero: Revelation, Aaron Ryan has achieved that rarest of feats – a prequel that not only enriches the original work it springs from, but elevates it to profound new heights. Armed with a new understanding of the Shipley family’s tragic history and formative traumas before the fall, the later Dissonance novels become an even richer, more layered tapestry of human perseverance in the face of unthinkable adversity.
At the same time, Ryan has also delivered a blood-curdling masterclass in slow-burn apocalyptic dread and white-knuckle alien invasion thrills. Few authors so completely understand the existential fears of our age the way Ryan continues to with each new entry. With its emphasis on family bonds and moral questions far knottier than mere good vs. evil, Revelation provides a spiritual foundation for the Dissonance saga’s thorny inquiries into human morality and social responsibility.
A story of heart-shredding loss and hard-won preservation of the self against the forces of destruction, both human and otherworldly. A ticking-clock race against a threat as inscrutable as it is horrific, rendered in intimate strokes of empathy and dread. A staggering, thought-provoking, and utterly unshakable act of genre storytelling from an author at the height of his imaginative powers. Dissonance Volume Zero: Revelation is not just Ryan’s finest work to date – it’s also a towering milestone of modern science fiction, and a vital addition to the canon. Reading is believing – and you owe it to yourself to experience this heart-stopping prequel firsthand. Believe the hype, and prepare to be shattered anew.
