ASIN : B08B3NP4LJ
Publisher : John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 25, 2021)
Publication date : May 25, 2021
Language : English
File size : 6971 KB
Praise for THE APOCALYPSE SEVEN
“Doucette’s ’seven’ aren’t just ‘magnificent’—they’re also entertaining as hell.” —Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author of the Infected Trilogy
“The adventure I’ve been looking for! Never once did I know what to expect, and I loved being proved wrong at every turn. Far more mind-bending than a book this fun has any right to be.” —Zack Jordan, author of The Last Human
“[A] riveting postapocalyptic outing… Doucette’s vibrant prose and unique premise make for an enticing adventure.” —Publishers Weekly
“A cinematic, speculative exercise in which a ragtag band saves the world, kind of.” —Kirkus Reviews
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whatever.
The whateverpocalypse. That’s what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets.
Add freakish weather to the mix, swings of temperature that spawn tornadoes one minute and snowstorms the next, and it seems things can’t get much weirder. Yet even as a handful of new survivors appear—Paul, a preacher as quick with a gun as a Bible verse; Win, a young professional with a horse; Bethany, a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysics adjunct—life in Cambridge, Massachusetts gets stranger and stranger.
The self-styled Apocalypse Seven are tired of questions with no answers. Tired of being hunted by things seen and unseen. Now, armed with curiosity, desperation, a shotgun, and a bow, they become the hunters. And that’s when things truly get weird.
GENE DOUCETTE is the author of more than twenty sci-fi and fantasy titles, including The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens, the Immortal series, Fixer and Fixer Redux, Unfiction, and the Tandemstar books. Gene lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
INTERVIEW
- What is on your nightstand?
Nothing! I know this is the wrong answer and/or a terrible answer, but I don’t really have a nightstand. What I do when I go to bed every night is surf the internet as a whole and Tumblr in particular, a task that takes an hour or more. Then I put my laptop on the floor under the bed and call it a night. So I guess in the spirit of the question my laptop is on my nightstand.
- What author would you totally fan?
Probably Neal Stephenson, if I’m interpreting “fan” as a verb correctly. He’s the only author whose work, while reading, makes me go, “I have literally no idea how he got here or where he’s going.”
- What makes you cringe?
Embarrassment-humor. This is where, in movies and tv shows, the humor is based on a character being embarrassed for some reason. All it does is make me feel uncomfortable. I think the pinnacle of this kind of humor was in the film Meet the Parents, which I’d heard was really funny. I spent the whole movie cringing; I don’t think I laughed once.
- Do you obsessively plot out each point or just go with the flow?
I absolutely do not plot out… well, anything really. I’m notorious for figuring out how a story is going to end while I’m writing my way to that ending. In fact, when I do plot out things it makes it more difficult to write. Back when I was starting out, people said, “You must outline” and so I outlined. I never ever finished anything I outlined.
This approach works great for me as a writer, but it doesn’t work as well when it comes to other things, like paying bills. We’re all surprised when I pay a bill on time.
- Is there a word you love to use?
I probably have a lot of words that I use too much and don’t know I use too much until they’re pointed out. Like in one of the edits for The Apocalypse Seven it was pointed out that I way overused the word “thing”. But words I love to use? I remember saying ages ago that I thought the word “badger” was inherently funny and vowed to use it more often. I think I managed to slip it into The Apocalypse Seven one time. Other than that, I like scheduling important events in my novels on Tuesdays, because nothing ever happens on Tuesdays. So: “Badger” or “Tuesday” for words I consciously like, “Thing” for a word I didn’t know I liked.
congrats on the release, this sounds interesting