Was there a challenge in accommodating the pace of events over the years you spent writing? You incorporate events as recent as Biden’s election. That it provides a way for people to orientate themselves emotionally to what is happening. “Oh, so that’s what you’ve been working on, writing your little book? Great.” I had to cling to the idea that art matters. Plus, I felt so fucking stupid and trivial. It was difficult to write this book and look at what was happening and not have some despair. Suddenly it’s lockdown and global pandemic and for a year, the news was full of things that happened in my book. Well imagine writing it! I turned in the first draft to my editor in February 2020. Considering how the book incorporates real events, and how speculative elements seem to be coming true, it made for an especially disconcerting read.
I read The Deluge in that strange no-man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s when reality already feels malleable. I know I should try to enjoy it, but that’s still pretty notional. It’s been over a decade working on this book, so the thought that it’s going to be read by actual people is alarming. Stephen Markley: Well, the nerves are starting to butterfly around. How are you feeling, considering the amount of work you’ve put into this book? Because in the face of such existential threat, how do we cling to hope? And how does Stephen Markley remain so damn cheerful?ĮSQUIRE: We’re speaking a week before The Deluge hits shelves. In particular, I was interested in King’s final word: uplifting. Now, upon the book’s publication, I was keen to speak to Markley about each element of that praise. “Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting” he tweeted, back in August 2022. Maybe that’s why Stephen King went out as an early batter for The Deluge. No bookseller would place this in the horror section of the store, but it is profoundly frightening nonetheless. The book traces our shared fate through four decades of accelerating chaos as activism fails, politics betray us, and both the world and society heat up. It’s a behemoth, 900-page map to the madness of humanity’s near-future. But where Ohio focused on a single night in a single blue-collar town, The Deluge takes the entire planet as its stage. Both books share certain traits: a broad cast of characters, an of-the-moment response to crisis, and well-researched insight into the details of the problem.
The Deluge, out now, is his second novel, following 2018’s acclaimed Ohio. We can still talk books, though, because Markley has written one. But this is not a sane or rational world. Global warming, the climate collapse, call it whatever you want-in a sane world, it would be the only thing anyone is talking about, because it constitutes the greatest threat to human society in our entire checkered history. Cooking My Way Through the Stephen King Cookbookīy “this,” he means our environmental crisis.
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