[Below, the critic offers a mixed review of John Bergin's nuclear-winter novel, From Inside.]

In this strange, post-apocalyptic birth story [titled From Inside], a pregnant woman sees her husband fry during the nuclear flash before she manages to escape on a train with other survivors. The group travels through the wreckage of a bleak world looking for food, shelter and a suitable place to stop the train. Along the way, the passengers overcome a host of chilling obstacles, the least of which is the woman's complicated childbirth. Understandably depressed, the woman is ambivalent about her baby, unable to reconcile the new life of her child with the fast approaching death of the world. Any symbolic connection between the train traveling through the refuse of a planet and a child leaving the womb is lost in too many scenes of fire, destruction and mounting series of wicked dreams. [John] Bergin's dark artwork aptly illustrates the desperation at the end of the world, with appropriately apocalyptic red and brown overtones evoking blood and fire. With a suggested soundtrack for readers, this rarely breaks out of it's pretentious vision, but it is a valiant try.