Maureen F. McHugh’s short story collection After the Apocalypse can best be summed up as “ordinary people in bad circumstances acting in ways that are not entirely admirable but which are understandable, all things considered”. The power of the collection lies in forcing the reader to confront the high probability that they might react in similar ways, given the stressors the characters in question operate under. Why wouldn’t a man condemned to prison inside a zombie-infested compound, reduced to meat by the government, start thinking of his fellow prisoners the same way? That’s the conceit of “The Naturalist”, the first story in the collection, and it’s far from atypical.
Indeed, most of the stories in After the Apocalypse are less than entirely cheerful. “The Effect of Centrifugal Forces” puts its teenaged protagonist in an impossible position – dying mother, dysfunctional mother’s lover, drug-addled other parent, and no escape route, and ratchets up the pressure until it all has to come crashing down. The apocalypse here is a bird-borne variant on Mad Cow disease, slow and deadly and devastating, less a destroyer of the world at large than of the protagonist’s own world. The title story, on the other hand, has a more wide-reaching, if vaguely defined, disaster framing it, one that sends free spirited single mother Jane and her less-than-plucky daughter Franny scrambling north in the wake of a dirty bomb attack and subsequent economic disintegration. Here, McHugh takes the standard post-apocalyptic storytelling trope – gang of misfit survivors finds each other on the road and becomes a family to survive – and inverts it. Nate, the fellow refugee who helps Jane out of a number of scrapes, sticks his neck out for Jane and Nelly on numerous occasions, but he doesn’t throw Jane out of his sleeping bag when she climbs in. As for Jane, she’s got a potent mix of issues – resentment that her daughter is less independent than she was, for one – burbling underneath her skin, and the choices she ultimately makes are consistent with her needs, not the mythical Good Mother’s.
More optimistic are “The Honeymoon” and “Kingdom of the Blind”, thematically similar tales wherein a nontraditional female protagonist purges herself of an unhealthy male influence. In the latter it’s a condescending boyfriend who, coincidentally, doesn’t have the vision to save what may be the world’s only working AI because doing so might cause work-related trouble; in the former, it’s a woman who dumps her idiot husband on their wedding night when she learns he squandered the money for their planned honeymoon. After brush with death in a clinical trial, she decides to take the honeymoon with friends instead, and after a symbolic act of purging, emerges as free.
There are in fact a lot of apocalypses in here: a bird flu epidemic in “Special Economics”, dirty bomb attacks on the US in “After the Apocalypse” and “The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large”, zombies in “The Naturalist” and catastrophic climate change in “Useless Things”, among others. What matters, though, is less the disasters themselves but rather the effects they have on society – the rules they allow to be broken and recast, the reactions everyday human beings make to the new situation, and most of all, the changed context of so-called “normal” life. Because it isn’t normal, McHugh seems to be saying; it’s a product of a particular place and time and set of rules, and if anything upsets the apple cart, then all bets are off – even for nice, normal people like us.
(Small Beer Press, 2011)
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