Huw Collingbourne's Blog: Huw Collingbourne's Blog

Life, Death & Disco in a Northern Town (Summer 1976) is a serialized novel that I will be publishing one episode a week during the coming year (or so). It is a big, sprawling novel with a huge cast of characters. Set in a town in the north of England in the long, hot summer of 1976, it begins with a murder. But it's not a crime novel. It's a set of tightly interlinked stories about people who are affected by the murders. Some stories are funny, others sad, some of the character's lives are filled with adventure, others have nothing but lost dreams. You can subscribe for free on my Substack: https://huwcollingbourne.substack.com/

In the 2nd book of The Exodus Plague, there is a holiday camp that's been converted to a prison camp. Pure fantasy? Not at all. I've made a video to explain the real-life basis of this. https://youtu.be/3eXWFP--Twc

Is it realistic to imagine that a holiday camp might be converted into a prison came? If you've read volume 2 of The Exodus Plague (the novel "Imprisoned") you'll know that this is something that happens in that book. If you thought this was pure fantasy, think again. In this video I tell you about occasions when this has happened in real life!

Gender Bending in the 1980s! If you've read my 80s Murder Mystery novels, you may wonder why Brigitte's pronouns keep changing. Here's an insight!

If you are new to post-apocalyptic fiction or if you’ve already read a few novels but want some idea on what to read next, watch my video. I explain a bit about what post-apocalyptic fiction is and recommend a few of the real classics of the genre. Enjoy! 

Ah, the glamour! The celebrities! The music! The nightclubs!

So what was it really like to be a pop music journalist in the days of the New Romantics? I've just started a new YouTube channel that will explain everything. If you've read any of my '80s Murder Mysteries' novels, these videos will explain some of the real-life background. Be sure to subscribe so that you will receive notification whenever I post some new videos. Here are the first three...

My new book of stories, Saturday Night In The City Of The Dead (subtitled “Tales From The Apocalypse”) has just been published. If you’ve already read any of my Exodus Plague novels these stories will take you deeper into the world devastated by the great catastrophe. If you haven’t read those novels, these stories are a good place to start…

A man wakes in an unfamiliar room. A luxury cruise liner becomes a plague ship. Three children invite a stranger into their home – with horrific consequences.

In a kill-or-be-killed world, are you the hunter or the prey? Who can you trust? In the final pandemic, will your friends become your enemies? Who is the monster? The raging child? The creature in the cellar? The man with the gun? Or is the monster you?

Saturday Night In The City Of The Dead explores the outer reaches of a world torn apart by The Exodus Plague.
The enemy is everywhere. Trust no one.

You can buy Saturday Night In The City Of The Dead in paperback or for Kindle (currently at just 99 cents!) from:
Amazon (US): https://tinyurl.com/5aff36fx
Amazon (UK): https://tinyurl.com/77apjkfd
And worldwide.

I hope you enjoy reading it!
Best wishes
Huw

Several of the authors who’ve been interviewed for this blog write post-apocalyptic fiction. I too have written a post-apocalyptic series, The Exodus Plague. So what is the attraction of writing, and reading, about the worst things we can imagine?

Post-apocalyptic fiction takes us into a world that has gone out of control. This sort of fiction tries to imagine the worst-case scenario – and then it takes one step further into the abyss. What if a disease were so deadly and so infectious that it killed most of the earth’s population? What if the crops failed? What would happen if cultivated but deadly plants went on the rampage just as almost everyone in the world became blind?

Speculative fiction has, at various times, imagined all these possibilities. George R. Stewart described a world depopulated by disease in ‘Earth Abides’ way back in 1949. A global crop failure formed the basis of John Christopher’s 1956 novel, ‘The Death Of Grass’. And the deadly plants in a blind world are, of course, central to John Wyndham’s classic 1951 novel, ‘The Day Of The Triffids’.

It might seem odd that so many of us would choose to read, for pleasure, stories about global catastrophes. And yet, horrific fiction has an almost universal appeal. Probably one of the pleasures of reading this sort of fiction derives from the fact that, just like a nightmare, we can emerge from it unscathed. We wake from the nightmare or put down the book and realise that the world in which we actually live isn’t quite as bad as the imagined world we’ve left behind.

If vampires and werewolves were real we would probably not be at all pleased to find ourselves locked inside a castle with one of them. But in fiction, we can enjoy the pleasure of watching other people dealing with horrific situations while we are quite safe, sitting next to a warm fire with the cat on our lap and a glass of wine ready to hand. 

Another feature of most post-apocalyptic fiction is that the stories concentrate not on the global catastrophe itself (which might depress the reader rather than entertain) but on the experiences of individuals trying to get on with daily life in exceptionally difficult circumstances. 

The classic post-apocalyptic books I mentioned earlier – ‘Earth Abides’, ‘The Death Of Grass’ and ‘The Day Of The Triffids’ – were all written in the 1940s and 1950s. It is easy to imagine why the apocalypse might have been on people’s minds at that time. After the Second World War, most readers would have had personal experience of a real-life global catastrophe. When that war ended, a number of others sprung up in Malaya, French Indochina (leading to the Vietnam War), Korea and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Cold War was getting ever frostier as people wondered whether nuclear Armageddon might be about to be unleashed upon the world. 

That may explain the attraction of this genre in the middle of the 20th Century. But why is post-apocalyptic fiction still popular now, in the 21st century?

The trivial answer would be something along the lines of – oh, but we have new fears now: global warming, ocean acidification, tensions between Korea or Russia and the UK or USA, pollution, genetic modification, fake news, cross-species diseases and so on…

But maybe there is more to it than that. One of our greatest fears is, I think, is our reliance on technology. On the one hand, we fear that technology may be used against us: our mobile phones can be used to track us, our Internet profiles make it easy for criminals to find out who we are, where we are, what jobs we do, the names of our pets, and even more intimate information if we aren’t very careful! On the other hand, our lives are so dependent on technology – computers, phone networks, electricity, powered vehicles – that we would feel helpless without it. Without our phones, how would we contact people? Without the Internet, how would we find up-to-date information or download eBooks or place orders with online retailers? Without ready access to our doctors and hospitals, how we would stay healthy? Without biologically engineered vaccines, how would we combat emerging diseases?

The entire infrastructure of our world depends on technology. Sometimes it’s scary when we have it. But it would be even scarier if it were all to disappear. 

There are many possible things that might destroy our technologically-centred lives, and writers have used all of them – EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulses, either manmade or generated by a phenomenon such as a solar flare), catastrophic climate change, nuclear war, mega-earthquakes or meteor strikes, natural or laboratory-created pandemics. Overnight, society as we know it is destroyed. This is such a terrifying possibility that, in our everyday life, it is altogether simpler to avoid even thinking about it. But, just like all our darkest thoughts, sometimes it can be curiously pleasant to experience the nightmare – and then wake up from it. 

I recently published a trilogy of post-apocalyptic novels called The Exodus Plague (the novels are called The Snow, Imprisoned and Escape). These are set in Britain at the time when a catastrophic snowfall is followed by an even more catastrophic pandemic. Reviews so far are positive, I'm pleased to say!

Here's advance warning that early in 2021 I'll publish a new Exodus Plague book - this time a collection of stories exploring the effects of the pandemic on a range of people, most of whom haven't featured in the novels.

Will there be more Exodus Plague novels too? What can I say? Watch this space!

Anyway, thanks to all my readers. Let's hope for a better 2021 when the apocalypse is confined to fiction!

It came with the snow. Overnight the world changed. Snowbound, in an isolated cottage, Jonathan Richards wakes from illness to discover that the world he knew has gone.

I began writing this trilogy of novels about two years ago, at a time when the idea of a global pandemic seemed purely within the realms of fiction. Well, just to show that truth can sometimes be as strange (almost!) as fiction, we have now all had to learn to live with a pandemic. However, try to imagine how much worse it could have been – or, one day, still might be! That is the story of The Exodus Plague. 

Book 1, ‘The Snow’ tells the story of a devastating blizzard that brings Britain to a standstill. But worse is yet to come. Because, with the snow comes something else. Something that will turn Britain into a kill-or-be-killed country where only the ruthless will survive.

Book 2, ‘Imprisoned’ takes you into a post-pandemic world in which some communities struggle to resume normal life. But what is normality? Why are there still students in Cambridge university while in the seaside resort of Stony Cove, a derelict holiday camp is under Army control?

Book 3, ‘Escape’ tells another story that begins in snowbound London before taking the reader into the heart of darkness of the devastated British countryside. The novel starts  as Justin Davenant wakes to hear something clawing at the front door, trying to get in! 

Britain is snowbound. Bodies lie unburied. Gangs of bestial semi-humans roam the streets. 

Welcome to The Exodus Plague!

The Exodus Plague: 

Amazon US https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08NTX4N9V

Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08NTX4N9V