Apocalypse How?
When I wrote my new thriller Dark Tomorrow I imagined what I thought was pretty much a worst-case scenario.
The United States is hit with a massive cyber attack launched by an undetermined enemy, plunging the East Coast into darkness, cutting off all of the systems that we rely upon in our daily lives, from public transportation to the Internet to phone service, turning everything from medical devices to cars to chemical plants into weapons.
My protagonist, FBI Special Agent Lisa Tanchik, must track down a hacker to help US Cyber Command establish who is waging cyberwarfare on the nation.
And then COVID-19 came along and the entire world changed. While the scenario that I portray in Dark Tomorrow is still frightening and still a very distinct possibility, I’ve realized just how high a bar the real world sets for writers of paranoid thrillers. Just when you think you’ve come up with a state-of-the-art nightmare, reality says, “Hold my beer.”
This has all gotten me thinking about how to respond to our current circumstances as a writer. As I work on my next book, I know that it’s going to be different somehow from what has come before. It will be different because the world is different, my readers are different, and I’m different.
As I work on that book, I’ve been listening a lot to a new album from one of my favorite bands, The Mountain Goats. It’s called Songs for Pierre Chuvin, and I think it must be one of the first works created post-COVID-19, but no doubt there will be many more. John Darnielle, the band’s singer-songwriter, was self-quarantining, isolated from his band and the studio, so he returned to writing and recording songs on the Panasonic boombox that he had used to record his earliest indie efforts like All Hail West Texas. In 90-minute breaks from his family during March, he wrote one new song a day, each one inspired by A Chronicle of the Last Pagans by French historian Pierre Chuvin, then releasing the recording in April.
Pierre Chuvin feels fresh and immediate, the lo-fi sound of an artist both getting weird in his own particular way, but also connecting with the moment. It’s the sound of someone remembering why they do what they do, with a nod to their past and an uncertain eye toward the future. Here are a few particularly memorable lines from the album’s last track, Exegetic Chains:
The places where we met to share our secrets now and then
We will see them again
Change will come
Stay warm inside the ripple of the Panasonic hum
It grinds and it roars
Headed somewhere better if I have to crawl there on all fours
Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night
Keep the chains tight
Make it through this year
If it kills you outright
There are references there to the band’s signature song, “This Year,” which is also a pretty good anthem for the pandemic, as well as the hum and hiss of the vintage boombox that he began recording on. I think Darnielle is saying that, for creative types (and probably everyone else) the way forward through these very dark times is to get back to first principles, the things that made us start writing, the things that make life worth living.
I think I need to get back to work now.
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