The book doesn’t lean on the familiar post-apacolyptic tropes. No traveling bands or cures. But the old world is still present: its artifacts, its language, its memory. Many of the characters lived through the before. We get a glimpse of the event in the first story, but the Wave matters less than what people do in its wake.
That’s really the whole game. It’s a quiet way of writing about character: these people appear to be navigating a collapsed world, but they’re dealing with the same things we all carry. Power. Family. Forgiveness. Where you stand and where you fall.
What surprises me, looking at the whole project, is how far it traveled from those two disconnected stories. Without any plan, it became a twenty-year arc of a family: what pulls them apart, what they carry, what they can’t put down. That’s what I hope stays with a reader when they close the last page. Not the world, not the event. A reminder that what’s worth holding onto was never the creature comforts, or whatever we imagine other people think is important. Just the bonds and the shared history that live inside us, long after everything else is gone.
After the Second Wave didn’t start as a collection. It started with two unrelated stories. An Evening Fire in its original form, featured a solitary man in a compound mourning his wife. A few iterations in, I added an apocalyptic mob outside, trying to burn the place down. Around the same time, a second idea arrived: a young man living on the side of an old landfill, in a world that had already ended. The stories weren’t connected, but they rhymed. Same tone, same register, same broken world underneath. Without much effort, I could see them sharing a universe. So After the Second Wave was born.
I’ve written before about finding my genre. Once I landed on the PA space, it was easy to stay there. Genre gives me a container for the stories I actually want to tell, in a style that feels natural: character driven, not purely literary but not pulpy either. Whether the themes land is for the reader to decide.
The world building has been more deliberate than the origin story suggests. The collection follows three siblings torn apart by the Second Wave, and the world grew around how they move through it. Frightening hotels. Landfills run on indentured servitude. Crypto-utopias. The settings evolved alongside Mags, Emmie, and Hugo, each one built to put pressure on them in different ways.
