Kris Ashton

In early 2015, I rediscovered the website BadMovies.org. I had come across it a time or two over the years while searching for information on various films, but this time I properly indulged in its amusing reviews of, shall we say, low-budget productions.

I was up to ‘R’ in its alphabetical listing and reading a review of the sci-fi/horror ‘classic’ Robot Monster (1953). I was somewhat familiar with this B-picture courtesy of Stephen King’s review in Danse Macabre, which more or less amounted to, “Don’t watch it stoned or you might die from laughter.” Anyway, the Bad Movies review was by the website’s founder, Andrew Borntreger, and towards the end of the review he wrote:

There is nobody left to carry on the human race who is not related! The end of the world suddenly looks a lot like West Virginia.

I got a laugh out of that… and about five seconds later I got a story idea.

I stopped composing a novel so I could get this new story out of my head. It had the working title ‘The End of the World Looks a Lot Like West Virginia’ and I thought I would cap it off in a couple of days. But the thing grew… and grew… and grew. My little story idea turned out to be a novella.

I shopped it around, but there was rapid consensus among editors that the ending (where Bobby discovered he had unwittingly impregnated his half-sister) didn’t sufficiently reward a reader who had been patient enough to hang around for 13,000 words.

So I went back and took another swipe at it. What had been an overlong ‘twist in the tale’ story with a streak of black comedy became a rumination on the pressure young males feel to lose their virginity – and the subsequent neuroses that can result. I gave it a new title to reflect this: ‘A Teenage Apocalypse’.

It fared no better in the marketplace.

I pulled back from it altogether for a few months. When I picked it up again and read it over, I realised the main problem, bizarrely, was that the concept that got me writing in the first place was too flippant, too callow, for the events that preceded it. I also noticed that elements such as the recurrence of blood, Bobby’s reluctance to take care of his demented mother, and the lighthouse, appeared to be incomplete or misdirected symbolism.

Then all at once I had it – this was a coming-of-age tale set in apocalyptical milieu. I rewrote it under its current title and sent it into the publishing world again, to a much better reception. Rejections were usually because its opening pages were reminiscent of The Stand and other ‘plague’ scenarios, but I knew those readers had missed the subtext, and I was confident ‘Blood and Light’ was a good piece of work.

In 2017 I happened upon a call-out for an anthology titled Apocalyptica and I had a strong suspicion story and anthology were made for each other. It was indeed accepted and even ended up inspiring the anthology’s cover art, a first for me.

But this tale’s zany and tumultuous origin story wasn’t finished yet.

Months rolled into years and the anthology failed to materialise for a variety of reasons. Silence is never a good sign in the small press world and, even though the editor hadn’t come out and said as much, I suspected the project had fizzled. Luckily, I hadn’t signed a contract, so I decided to put ‘Blood and Light’ back into the submission cycle. (When I got in touch with the editor to let him know I was withdrawing my story he explained he had become unwell and didn’t have the energy to devote to the project anymore.)

The length and subject matter of ‘Blood and Light’ meant markets were limited, however, and the only one that really seemed to fit was an apocalypse-themed anthology from Dragon Soul Press called Lethal Impact. It was accepted (of course, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this) and I’m glad. A story that has been through so much deserves a good home.