Reds, Whites, & Blues

The civilized world, as we were once proud enough to call it, is over. Torn apart by the power of magical artifacts, newly discovered by man, exacerbating all the old crises and conflicts. The world was not done in by a single cataclysmic disaster, but by thousands of little disasters, both supernatural and ordinary. Twenty years later, the remains are fought over by the descendants of those few who survived. Draped in the flags of an old world long passed, the wars continue. 

Remnants of the United States government persist across the Northeastern seaboard, what they call the “Blue Zones”. The old ways cling to relevance here, where militarized police forces guard the skyscraper hamlets of the rich against the many threats of the wilderness beyond the cities. An idealistic young journalist gets her big break, a chance to explore beyond the walls, into the dangerous wastelands of the Midwest. She travels to the Red Zones, peppering the maps from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Northwest, scattered settlements banded together under a shared, albeit strained anticapitalist ethos. To the south lay the White Zones, God’s country, where heretics and witches alike are burned in zealous pyres. Between these ragtag armies lay the Great Wastes, where monsters and mutants roam, flora and fauna corrupted by magical radiation. The laws of physics are flexible in this feral land, the laws of man even more so. And in all of these places, normal people live their lives, find spaces to laugh, to love, and to leave their mark upon a world that already bears its’ scars for all to see. Their stories are worth telling.

Reds, Whites, and Blues is a post-apocalyptic urban fantasy novel. Inspired by classic speculative works such as Roadside Picnic, as well as modern political fiction, it asks how a fantastical end-of-civilization scenario would impact people from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, with the polarized political divides of our modern world brought to their bloodsoaked logical endpoints. Manuscript currently in progress.