Julianna Baggott is Post-Apocalyptic [Fierce Anticipation]

Fiercely Anticipating

Once you’ve published a post-apocalyptic novel, you’re a post-apocalyptic writer. There’s no way around this. It’s something I didn’t really understand when I was writing PURE, the first book in a post-apocalyptic trilogy that came out on February 8th. Sure the book was post-apocalyptic, but me? It just seemed like a strange thing to have to embrace about myself. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly called it a horror novel and in those two words I became a horror writer. It’s also a thriller, so I’m suddenly a thriller writer. It’s a lot of things my earlier books aren’t, and so I’m a lot of things I’ve never been before.

I thought about this post-apocalyptic writer thing for a while and realized that, actually, I was kind of a post-apocalyptic teenager. But aren’t the teen years, by definition, post-apocalyptic? Then I thought about how, as a child, I feared the end of the world and was the only kid to take Civil Defense Drills seriously. I curled up in a row of kids along the inner hallway wall of my elementary school, taking in the elementary school dust, and knew that we weren’t going to survive. I imagined the searing light of nukes and felt sick. The end — that’s what I was clear on. How could we go back and do math when the end was so inevitable that we had to practice for it?

Truth is, I was probably a post-apocalyptic baby.

And so what am I fiercely anticipating? What I’ve always fiercely anticipated. Total mutual destruction. Nations made of human beings who can’t truly learn from the past and are doomed to repeat it.

Have I gone a little dark at the end here? I have. But what else can you expect from a post-apocalyptic thriller horror writer?

So, let me leave you with a little LURV! It’s almost Valentine’s Day — and so HERE is your post-apocalyptic Valentine’s Day Card. Send it to your significant (dyptopian) other.

Kinda Wanna See (or Read, Eat, etc)

Look, if the end is coming, I want to have eaten my share of dark chocolate. Fair enough. When you’re a fearful type, you have to get in the habit of seizing the day — and sometimes dark chocolate is involved in that, for me.

Wouldn’t Go (or Read, See, etc.) If You Paid Me

I don’t know about other post-apocalyptic writers, but I have no interest in those who seem to know when the apocalypse is going to strike. It’s adorable, don’t get me wrong. They’re so damn earnest you feel like you’re caught in a fundamentalist Wes Anderson film. But I don’t really want to see a fundamentalist Wes Anderson film. I’ll see this one instead:

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