The End Has Come

This is a very special release day for me. It was nearly two years ago that John Joseph Adams and I had lunch in Chicago and he told me about his idea for a 3-part anthology or “Triptych.” Each entry of the triptych would focus on one stage of the end-times. With The End is Nigh, we looked at the pre-apocalypse. And then came The End is Now, which was when the bad stuff went down. Today, we proudly release The End Has Come, which looks at the post-apocalypse.

The roundup of authors who signed on still astounds me. It’s been an all-star lineup, and I’ve been both terrified and honored to work with them on these stories. There’s a little bit of everything in here. Just what a great anthology should be.

A few notes about my story: This is the only place where I’ve continued to write about the world of WOOL beyond the original trilogy. The story arc of my three pieces was set up very deliberately. I wanted to explore how people with tenuous connections to one another can still manage to drastically shape lives, even over great distances of space and time. What we choose to do reverberates. What motivates us has consequences. There are characters here who make decisions out of fear and anger, and this leads others to make even worse decisions, and it all ends badly.

I know many readers will be shocked at the final page of the third story. Know that I don’t write in order to be gratuitous. Often, what I write hurts me as well. It hurts deeply. And that’s reason enough to go there and to explore those ideas and to commit to them. Because it shouldn’t be easy or flippant. Nothing about this series has been. And that’s why I’m as proud of these books as any that I’ve been a part of.