#prepper fiction

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Alderman’s ‘The Future’

Naomi Alderman burst onto the scene in 2016 with The Power, an explosive and brilliant feminist apocalyptic parable. Now, seven years later, she's back with a chunky, propulsive second novel about a very different sort of apocalypse: The Future:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Future/Naomi-Alderman/9781668025680

The Power was a thriller about a mysterious force that gives women the power to administer violent electric shocks – even lethal ones – from the palms of their hands. As this power races around the world, the status quo is abruptly shattered. Abusers get nasty surprises. The Saudi government topples. Parents of teenaged boys demand sex-segregated classes to protect their sons from vicious girls:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/10/10/naomi-aldermans-the-power-in-which-fierce-power-of-women-is-awoken/

In The Future, we get a very different kind of apocalypse: the imagined apocalypse of the prepper. At the core of prepperism is a fantasy: that the world will experience a cataclysm that requires the special skills and supplies of the prepper themselves. Water chemists who turn prepper fantasize about attacks on the water-supply – not because there's any special reason to expect one, but because if terrorists attack the water supply, then water chemists become civilization-rescuing heroes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

(And of course, if the world ends in such a way that marauding bandits rove the wasteland, eating their former neighbors, then macho, AR-15-obsessed musketfuckers get to reinvent themselves as warlords who defend the sheeple from "bad guys.")

This is what makes billionaire prepper fantasies just so weird – for most of us, it's hard to imagine how the skills of a billionaire are the one thing we'll need to see us through a crisis. But for billionaires themselves, the necessity of billionaires in rebooting civilization is so self-evident as to be unquestionable.

What's more, billionaires are convinced – more than any of us – that the world is about to end. As Douglas @Rushkoff puts it, these guys want to earn enough money to outrun the consequences of how they're making all that money. This is #TheMindset, the idea that your own position has jeopardized civilization itself, but that also, you must survive the cataclysm, because only you can survive it.

Rushkoff chronicles the real-world fantasies of luxury bunkers patrolled by mercenaries locked into explosive discipline collars in his book Survival of the Richest:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

But billionaires don't just suck at running civilization, they also suck at making up stories about its collapse. One thing that's striking about Rushkoff's ethnography of rich people preparing to outlive the end of the human race is how banal their eschatological fantasies are.

It's not that there aren't any exciting stories to tell about billionaire survival fantasies. The granddaddy of these is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 "#MasqueOfTheRedDeath":

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

I published an updated version with the same title in 2019 in my novella collection #Radicalized:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

In The Future, we get a cracking, multi-point-of-view adventure novel about billionaires prepping for the end of the world. Three billionaires, the lords of thinly veiled analogs to Facebook, Google and Amazon, each getting ready in their own way. Stumbling into their midst comes Lai Zhen, a prepper influencer vlogger with millions of followers.

When Zhen becomes romantically entangled with Martha Einkorn, the top aide and chief-of-prepping for one of these billionaires, she finds herself in possession of an AI chatbot that is devoted to protecting a very small number of people from incipient danger. This chatbot determines that Zhen is being stalked by an assassin at a mall in Singapore, and guides her to safety.

The chatbot is a closely held secret among the tech billionaire cabal. It is designed to monitor world events and predict when The Event is imminent, be it disease, war, or other cataclysmic disaster. With the chatbot's predictive powers and its superhuman guidance, the billionaires, their families, and their closest confidantes will be able to slip away before the shit hits the fan, fly by different private jets to one or another luxury bunker, and wait out the apocalypse. Once the fires raging without have died down to embers, the chatbot's billionaire charges will emerge to assume their places as wise and all-powerful leaders of the next human civilization.

As you might imagine, not everyone who finds out about this plan – including various members of the billionaires' families who are fully aware of these rich, powerful people's fallibility – is enthusiastic about it. As we build toward a looming crisis, we cycle between these family members, Zhen and her hacker buddies, and members of an online prepper community where Einkorn is a kind of provocateuse and eminence grise.

Alderman skillfully maneuvers all these power players and blocs into position before detonating the crisis that sets off the book's second act, where we get into some damned fine Masque of the Red Death territory, but clad in Tony Stark mecha survival suits and against a backdrop of total disaster.

I won't give away any spoilers here, except to say that there are lots of twists (that won't surprise readers of The Power, which had its own excellent surprises). But without delving too deeply into the fake-outs, crosses, and turns that Alderman lays, I will say that this is a fantastic and incredibly satisfying comeuppance novel that gets very deep into the ideology of wishing the world would end, and dreaming that when it does, you will finally matter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/07/preppers-of-the-red-death/#the-event

[marsymallows]

Exploring Slow Living: Documentaries, Movies, and Books

I don’t know a lot of people who share the same desperation I have for a slow life except for my boyfriend, a friend I constantly talk to these days and a bunch of online strangers in a Reddit sub I’m subscribed to. My boyfriend lived in a farm. LOL. But setting aside all the memes and controversies now infamously associated with that line, he really did and he has always dreamed of leaving the…

[traveling-madness]

At what point does an alternate version of a canon character become an oc... asking for some corpse in a lake.

[chicagocowboy]

Meth dealer sells misery to lot lizards

Jill’s pickup idled low in the neon-drenched truck stop as she watched Boone Cragg slice meth deals in the murky light. Cragg weaved among hookers working the lot, their eyes glazed with desperation and surrender, thanks to his poison. Jill squinted, watching the dirty dance of cash and crystal, each play another black mark on Cragg’s damned soul. A desperate blond woman didn’t have enough…

[libraryofbaxobab]

October 23, 2023:

Nice apocalypse, if you can get it. This looks like it wants to be considered a horror novel, but it's really more apocalyptic. Where that venn diagram intersects is up for debate. It's a little on the basic side. The catastrophe & survival aspect isn't hardcore, the scope of the book is highly localized (important theme), and it's morally black-and-white: the bad characters are the worst and never make good points. It was fun to hate the rich guy, it was obvious to hate the asshole-crackhead-gambling addict ex-husband, it was frustrating to hate the stepson. If those were all intentional, then this accomplished its goals well. I think the main character was in danger of being a little too much of a saint, so I'm glad she had the shitty stepson to piss her off sometimes. People who lean left will like this. Anarcho-syndicalists, communists, even baby socialists can vibe with what this story's putting out.

6/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[madlovenovelist]

Book Review – ‘The Summer the World Ended’ by Matthew S. Cox

A dystopian twist?! Genre: YA, Cotemporary, Apocalyptic No. of pages: 331 Riley McCullough thought her best friend getting ‘dragged’ off to Puerto Vallarta for the first two weeks of summer vacation was the end of the world―at least until the bombs fell. Life in suburban New Jersey with her mother is comfortable, not to mention boring, to an introverted fourteen-year-old. As if her friend’s…

[macrolit]

NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

[beaft]

Got any book recommendations? (Im on a hold list at my local library for the goblin emperor)

it depends what you like! here are some books of various genres that really stood out to me over the past few months:

the bee sting by paul murray (tragicomic family saga)

glass and god by anne carson (selected poetry/essays)

what moves the dead by t. kingfisher (gothic fantasy retelling of "the fall of the house of usher")

the sundial by shirley jackson (psychological thriller about a family of apocalypse preppers)

borne by jeff vandermeer (post-apocalyptic "new weird" fiction about the bond between a scavenger woman and her adopted monster-child)

strange practice by vivian shaw (1800s fantasy with some really excellent vampires)

city of glass by paul auster (detective noir with bonus surrealism)

normal rules don't apply by kate atkinson (linked short stories)

monsters by claire dederer (essay collection about great artists who were terrible people)

[maculategiraffe]

i'm rewatching big love (having my regularly scheduled spring depression and watching a bunch of fictional dumbfucks making gigantic amounts of trouble for themselves for no reason at all cheers me up) and the set dressing on this show is absolutely top notch. the basement of barb's house is full of those gray plastic buckets of dehydrated apocalypse rations and twenty-five pound sacks of rice but also: shrinkwrapped cases of fiji water. fiji water. of course these bougie ass mormon preppers fill their basement with fiji water. amazing. I love you set dressers

[nqueso-emergency]

“Prepare” to see Tommy. 🤣😭 the way they speak about him like it’s the worst thing in THEIR lives like “prepare for the worst!” Girl okay like you way too invested in some fictional men

Right?? Here's another doomsday prepper I found on my morning scroll

[traveling-madness]

At what point does an alternate version of a canon character become an oc... asking for some corpse in a lake.

[chicagocowboy]

Lost souls, chemical purgatory — and a plan

Under a cold, indifferent moon, Jill’s truck idled as she fixed her eyes on the rundown farmhouse where Boone Cragg sold death in small doses. A haven for the desperate and the damned, it rotted like meth teeth in the rural mouth of North Dakota. Through binoculars, Jill watched shadows shuffle in and out of Boone’s place. Each visitor wore their need like a shroud, their hunched figures moving…

[ambrosiaheights]

Character Profile: Emmaline

Art by me (main: @diabolical-blue)

Emmaline is the main character of Ambrosia Heights and the only POV character (the story is told exclusively from her perspective).

Appearance: Emmaline has blond hair, green eyes, pale skin, and is 5'8" tall.

— 🌹 —

Emmaline’s family and friends would describe her as quiet, reserved, even shy. However, that surface-level passiveness masks a headstrong, stubborn spirit and a fiery temper which only emerges in dire circumstances or in cases of disturbing injustice. When particularly provoked, she can even be prone to violent outbursts, but she bottles up her more explosive emotions to keep these at bay.

Her socially reclusive background and sometimes hard-to-love personality are not the only obstacles standing in the way of what she wants more than anything else. As someone with no desire for physical intimacy, but a deep desire for an emotionally intimate and committed lifelong partnership, Emmaline has faced misunderstandings and hurtful assumptions her entire life - leaving her feeling like her dreams of companionship will never be more than a far-flung fantasy.

She wasn’t always this cynical, though. From a young age, Emmaline possessed a deep love of the sort of fantasy stories and fairy tales where everything works out in the end. In fact, when she was ten years old, she thought she actually met someone who came from a world much like the ones in her stories: a blue-skinned elf child who needed help finding his way home through a portal hidden on her grandmother’s estate. Unfortunately, the ensuing twenty years of complicated family drama and a miserably unfulfilling adult life has led Emmaline to wonder if most of that magical childhood experience was just her imagination - until the night of her thirtieth birthday, when she finds herself unexpectedly transported to that very world herself.

— 🌹 —

Random facts about Emmaline:

Though not particularly confident with her own social skills, when Emmaline is interacting with someone who is even more shy and reserved than herself, her instinctual reaction is to take the lead for both of them, giving her the false appearance of a naturally confident or even dominating person.

Emmaline has no interest in fashion and dresses herself solely for comfort. In her own world, she’s most commonly seen wearing a t-shirt, jeans or shorts, and sometimes a plaid flannel shirt. She doesn’t usually feel comfortable in dresses or skirts and tends to avoid them if possible. The most consistent part of her wardrobe is a silver necklace with a rose-shaped pendant she received as a gift on her tenth birthday.

She has had a special interest in technology from a young age. Though no “tech genius” by any means, she still enjoys figuring out how electronic gadgets work and even taught herself how to repair her own phone.

She is pretty attached to her smartphone and keeps much of her favorite content offline - movies, songs, video clips - especially when preparing for a long trip which might involve unreliable Internet access.

From a young age, Emmaline fell into the role of “keeping the peace” between her parents, who oftentimes didn’t get along. Her mother in particular would use Emmaline as her confidante and would vent to her about her troubles in an oftentimes inappropriate capacity.

Emmaline is an only child and had a very lonely and isolated childhood. She was homeschooled, never attended a traditional school, and never really made any friends her own age. She took comfort in the fictional worlds of her favorite books instead, and would often daydream about befriending the elf boy she thought she met when she was ten years old.

Emmaline has a religious background due to her parents' beliefs (particularly her mother's), but is undecided about where she stands on many of those beliefs personally now that she is older and living independently.

Her parents were apocalypse preppers who believed the end times were imminent, and prepared their off-the-grid homestead accordingly. Although Emmaline wasn't always sure if she believed them, their beliefs still had a significant impact on her development, leaving her feeling disillusioned and unprepared for an adulthood she wasn't even sure she was going to be alive to see.

— 🌹 —

An excerpt from chapter 4 in which Emmaline ponders her frustrations about her upbringing (third-person narrative observations, not first-person internal thought):

So she would do what she was told, because she didn’t have a choice. She wouldn’t express her anger when she got upset. But she would still feel it. Every injustice, every hypocrisy she witnessed, every freedom that was limited or taken away from her, every hopeless tear shed as she pondered her grim future under her parents’ unrelenting control – it was just pushed deep down, shoved into the far corners of her soul, ever boiling and festering but utterly ignored. Like a volcano rumbling, rumbling, rumbling in the background, spewing the occasional bout of steam or ash, but never permitted to fully erupt.

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

The characters in Happiness were so well developed and showed their flaws from the beginning, which became worse or better over time, in such a human way.

We had a nice cast of Fairly Decent Human Beings, the main couple, the author, the brother (a bit selfish but proves himself), the older cop, the lawyer's wife, the store worker, the trainer, the old lady, and the Doomsday prepper:

They make mistakes out of fear or selfishness occasionally, but ultimately try to do the right thing, infected or not.

Then we have the cleaning couple, whose flaw is greed. At first you like them for exploiting the rich jerks, but then it goes way too far, excusing murder far:

Both the husband and Youtube Brat take their mother and family for granted and are self-centered. The son especially puts people in danger to try and get good videos. However, they both learn better by the end and seem to have improved:

The Lawyer and the Mistress are extremely self-centered, the lawyer expects his wife to do everything for his benefit, the mistress is only interested in the doctor's wealth and getting ahead. I don't know if I have a better name for the lawyer's specific flaw but he was very amoral and so elitist I hated him. The worst sort of arrogant jerk who expects his wife to be an extension of himself. Both of them were willing to do very dubious things for their own gain to exploit the situation:

The Aspiring Building Rep. and her husband were kind of a Lady Macbeth situation because the husband mostly seemed to follow her. ABR wanted power and to replace her wealth and went to further and further extremes to get it. At first she was unwilling to work with the Doctor, eventually she teamed up with a serial killer. She ended up doing a full descent into madness, which is also very Lady Macbeth:

And of course, the Doctor and Andrew are The Real Monsters Among Us, the best part of Zombie fiction:

There is some sort of metaphor in the fact the Doctor already is a monster and ends up imitating the infected:

The writing in this drama tho. They had this many characters and still made them all pretty three dimensional. The way they showed their flaws early on and then they grew slowly. It was masterful.

[stackslip]

one moment you're just developing a slightly morbid fascination with mormonism as a fundamentally usamerican religion with an fascinating history and culture, the next you're trying to explain to your mother how the movie posters you saw this morning at the train station are about an abusive creep who tried to pass off as a child sex slave saviour while courting qanon and who by virtue of his friendship with a shitty therapist who thought himself a prophet is tied to at least three different news stories about murder/child abuse/kidnapping that your mother saw and thought were completely unrelated when they're all linked by mormon preppers who are obsessed with near death experiences and evil spirits and the sacred right to murder your kids. this isn't even mentioning the psychic who wrote like hundreds of pages of conversation with a fictional prophet who was made up by joe smith while trying to argue indigenous people of the americas are the descendants of the lost tribes of israel

[haberdashing]

I know there's a lot of guides to where to find free ebooks around, but I was wondering:

Any advice or recommendations on what ebooks to look for in such places?

Thinking in terms of a vaguely prepper mindset, so how-to and educational books are welcomed, but also fiction and whatnot too.