![]() The dark swallows up the new geography that’s been shaken out over the old one, swallows up everything but you (she’s sleeping next to you, propped up against the cave wall, but the cave is so small you could reach out and slide your hand into her pocket), and you wake from nothing and know that the dark has pooled like oil in your ears and your nostrils, and even with your eyes squeezed shut you know it’s stained your vision until you can’t see, that you’re walking in circles as the ground under you is crumbling, that with the next step you’re going to fall, and then you wake and open your eyes, gasping, your hands scraping at the roof of your mouth to claw the darkness out, and she’s leaning over you, marking on your body with pencil where she’ll carve away the good meat, and when you scream at her the darkness slides into your stomach, and you wake to the sooty sky and her silhouette already standing outside the cave, untouched and impenetrable, and as you sit up something coils around your lungs and squeezes tight. Stories about demons and supernatural monsters can be entertaining, but deep down I don’t find them particularly scary, because I’m pretty certain those things don’t-and never will-exist. And in many ways, post-apocalyptic fiction is the scariest kind of fiction there is, because the more plausible a horrific story is, the scarier it is. It also allows us to start over from scratch, to wipe the slate clean and see what the world may have been like if we had known then what we know now.” But it’s since occurred to me that many of us have a strong attraction to things that scare us there wouldn’t be a horror genre otherwise. There, I said, “To me, the appeal is obvious: it fulfills our taste for adventure, the thrill of discovery, the desire for a new frontier. I also speculated at length about why we’re so fascinated by the end of the world. In Volume One’s introduction (which you can find online at /wastelands), I traced the rise and resurgence of post-apocalyptic fiction, citing the dawn of the Atomic Age as the former, and 9/11 as the latter. BIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENTS OF THE LIFE OF JULIAN PRINCE. ![]()
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