They are greeted by the sight of hundreds of stalled cars on the highway. When John’s car will not start, the family climbs into Jen’s Edsel to try to find Elizabeth. Suddenly, the family realizes there is no sound of highway traffic and no planes are flying overhead. Later that afternoon, Jennifer notices that her CD player is not working, and John’s phone call with a former colleague in Washington, DC, is cut off. John starts grilling burgers for the party and wonders when his elder daughter, 16-year-old Elizabeth, will come home. Afterward, she runs out to play with the family’s two golden retrievers, Zach and Ginger. Jennifer returns from school and appears run down, and John advises her to take some insulin. When he returns home, his mother-in-law Jen is there, and John teases her about the monstrosity she drives, a Ford Edsel. The novel begins on a pleasant spring afternoon as John searches for a birthday gift for his 12-year-old diabetic daughter, Jennifer. As the book depicts the fallout from this catastrophe, it examines the themes of the fragility of civilization, overdependence on technology, and a societal failure to heed the lessons of history. One Second After, told in limited third person and set in the real town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, follows college professor John Matherson as he tries to hold his family together and help his town survive in the face of total technological failure. Since the novel’s publication, Forstchen has addressed both Congress and NASA on the topic. Forstchen took his inspiration for One Second After from a 2004 congressional study about the potential threat of an EMP attack on the United States.

Arena william r forstchen