The Apocalypse Gene: Guest Post

WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT DEATH?

Unless you’re Bill Compton, Edward Cullen, or one of the new vamps to rise from a coffin onto the pages and screens of a zillion fans, there is only one thing in life that is absolutely unavoidable. DEATH. 

I don’t care how good a communicator you are – a champion freestyle rapper, world famous slam poet, master negotiator, multilingual Pulitzer-winning author with seventeen simultaneous best-selling novels, a memoir, and a blockbuster screenplay, you will never talk your way out of Death. That scares the flaming crap out of most of us. Laughing at it makes it seem a tad less horrifying. After all, what choice do we have? A hundred years from now, virtually every person sharing oxygen with you today will be dead, and it won’t stop there. Plants, animals, microbes, viruses, even cockroaches die. Planets, suns, galaxies, universes – all of CREATION – will die. We might as well face that with a smile and say, “Hey, Reaper-man, how ya doin’, what’s the haps? It was fun while it lasted.” 

In The Apocalypse Gene, the subject matter couldn’t be more dismal. The population is dying off, utterly without hope. Olivya’s neighborhood, once full of life, is now called Hospice Row where homes have been converted to warehouses for the dying. The only businesses still thriving are those that offer euthanasia services. But our intention for writing this story was to entertain, not send our readers plummeting off twentieth-floor ledges. It might be hard to imagine anything in that scenario being laugh-out-loud funny. Yet that’s what many reviewers have said.

As Kirkus said in their review, “ . . . the irreverent dialogue puts a lighthearted young-adult spin on the apocalyptic happenings; lines such as “It seemed perfectly natural to have a god-dude just chillin’ in her room,” and “That psychotic gash of a smile wasn’t just out of character, it was absolute creepsville” inject wit and levity into the somber storyline.”

Exactly, Kirk! We injected “wit and levity”, which made it not only ridiculously fun to write but funny too. The snappy dialogue provides relief from such dire circumstances, a break from tragedy. 

Kirkus also said, “This action-packed, breakneck-paced novel featuring a duo of lovestruck teenaged protagonists is a wildly imaginative young-adult apocalyptic thriller . . . ”

We did our best to build tension into every scene, but if we didn’t have comic relief, we might have been compelled ourselves to run into traffic to meet the grill of a fast-moving semi.

You’ve never read anything like this before, but don’t worry. When you read The Apocalypse Gene, you’ll see DEATH, but you’ll also be laughing. Read more about it at www.theapocalypsegene.com