Here’s the honest version of how this happened.
A few weeks back Felisa and I did a newsletter swap around her reader magnet, a prequel to her debut novel. Good fit for my subscribers, we both got something out of it, done. Then I put out my usual call for books to feature in my monthly post-apoc authors newsletter and her debut came up as a preorder. I included it. I thought I was done with my due diligence.
Then it came out on April 30th and I actually read the thing.
I write in this genre. I read more post-apoc than is probably healthy. So when I cracked open Overwhelming Chaos I was braced to be politely supportive about something I’d already publicly recommended, write something honest enough not to embarrass myself, and move on. That is not what happened.
Felisa sets her apocalypse in Manila, Philippines. That alone. I know what it costs to put your story somewhere unfamiliar when the market rewards the familiar. She does it anyway, and the result is a book that made me anxious in ways I haven’t felt since my first read of The Road.
The premise: a new pandemic, faster and deadlier than COVID, moving through the Philippines while the government lurches and fails and the wealthy charter planes out. We follow Zeyla, an American redhead stranded at her hotel as the city comes apart around her. The outsider perspective is the right call. She can communicate fine, English is everywhere in Manila, but she has no local support network, no mental map of the streets, no instinct for which risks are real and which are panic. That particular kind of alone, capable but unmoored, is harder to write than the language-barrier version and Ordep handles it well.
Then the book gives us Miko.
A Filipino child. Small. Funny in ways that don’t require translation. I will not describe what happens to him except to say that I was sitting on my couch on a Tuesday afternoon when I hit that sequence, and I got up and stood by the window for a while before I could continue. As a writer I kept asking myself: how is she doing this without milking it? The answer is restraint. The scene earns everything it asks of you.
The ensemble in the second half is strong. Sarge, a Special Forces soldier who is competent and quietly funny and running on a single urgent goal he doesn’t talk about much. R-Lon, a male nurse who refuses a gun and is never lectured into changing his mind about it. Sally, genuinely abrasive in a way that feels like a real person rather than a character flaw scheduled for resolution. These four have bad chemistry at first. The book is honest about that.
From a craft angle, here’s what I’d flag for fellow genre writers. The pandemic escalation in the opening act is among the best I’ve read: granular, credible, frightening in the right increments. There’s a moment where a Chinese fighter jet downs a civilian plane over the South China Sea. It conveys the global collapse without stopping the story, which is harder to do than it sounds. The survival details throughout feel researched rather than assumed.
Where it’s weaker: the prose is functional, not atmospheric. The middle section is episodic, one crisis per chapter, without always earning the connective tissue between them. Some of the antagonist groups blur.
None of that stopped me finishing in two sittings.
This is a debut. Set somewhere the genre hasn’t been, written by a Filipino author who clearly knows what it feels like when a city shuts down. The emotional beats land. The characters stay with you after you close it.
Go buy it. Come back and tell me I was right.
Overwhelming Chaos, Book One of the Overwhelm Series by Felisa Ordep.
In some ways I feel you are describing my own work. I suppose in some ways mine didn't give you the same vibe as Felisa’s. I'll study hers to inform my work. Thanks for the recommendation.