Unfortunately, telling the reader what they should believe is always a pretty surefire way to make a bad piece of art. I identified a bunch of traps with writing about any big social subject matter.

It often feels like a book or movie is trying too hard to inspire people to change their behavior, and that attempt is almost distracting from the story. Let’s talk about the challenges of turning climate change into really good art. That a horror novelist loved it tells you something. (Markley has also written storylines for the Hulu comedy Only Murders in the Building.) Stephen King, who read an advance copy of The Deluge, called it “the best novel” he read last year. The Deluge, by contrast, spans continents and careens through decades’ worth of nightmarish scenes that feel like they were made for Hollywood. Markley’s dark debut novel, Ohio, also took on a big social subject - the opioid crisis - but focused on one single night in a working-class town.

By extrapolating from present trends, Markley conjures a future filled with even more extreme far-right zealots, savvy fossil fuel PR campaigns, and laws cracking down on protesters as terrorists. And the brutal weather brings a violent reaction with it. Over the course of nearly 900 pages, climate disasters get personal, with roaring fires and ferocious floods coming for the characters’ loved ones. The Deluge stars both the people trying to save the world and the ones wrecking it: a scientist, an advertising strategist, a math genius, a drug addict, politicians, activists, and right-wing authoritarians. Was getting followed by a police cruiser while driving a van full of explosives part of the plot? What about that night walk through the forest with the conspirators?īridging the recent past with a climate-wrecked future, the hyper-realistic novel follows a sprawling cast of characters from 2013 until the 2040s. My subconscious had picked up the storyline around page 200, and after I got out of bed, I couldn’t remember exactly where the book stopped and my dream began.

That’s how immersive The Deluge is, an ambitious new novel by Stephen Markley. I was relieved to wake up from this dream and shake my paranoia that the FBI was after me. Birds were dropping dead from the sky, and a dust storm raged around us, turning the sun crimson. We were trying to avoid detection by the surveillance state, which was tracking activists after attacks on oil and gas infrastructure.

It was the year 2028, and I was hiding with eco-terrorists in a cabin deep in the woods.

Stephen markley books