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...