It’s the end of the world as we know it.
And I feel fine.
We all love a good apocalyptic story. Alien invasions. The dead returning to attack the living. Panic and disorder. Anarchy. If you listen closely you can hear the Sex Pistols shouting about it. Mass murder and mayhem. And wafting through the air the mingled smells of burning buildings, gunpowder, and the sheared-copper stink of fresh blood. The perfume of Armageddon.
Apocalyptic fiction hits us on a deep level. Deeper than the need to be entertained. Deeper than the need to escape on a skiff of words. Stories about the end of all things make us take a look around at what we have and what we could not bear to lose. It’s a sobering moment. It cultivates perspective; it sharpens the attachment to those things which we truly believe to be beyond value. Our loved ones. Our friends. Our own lives.
And at the same time it draws from us a laugh at the cosmic comedy of having become so deeply invested in things that are, in the vast perspective of time, transient and fragile. To the gods we must be like a tiny flame dancing on the end of a stick, believing it to be something eternal and ignoring the truth that it can only last until it has burned through the length of the stick. Then it, like all things, snuffs out.
In this collection of apocalyptic shorts we are treated to the horrors of the apocalypse on one page and the absurd comedy of the human condition on the next. These stories are fast, fearsome, funny and flawless. They capture the desperation of the struggle and distill it into often funny, often tragic bites of delicious literary apocalyptica.
DEAD ON EARTH: BEGINNINGS.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
And I feel fine.
-Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of ROT & RUIN, PATIENT ZERO and ZOMBIE CSU.
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