After the Apocalypse: Stories [Paperback]

Maureen F. McHugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 8, 2011

Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year

In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague.

Praise for Maureen F. McHugh:

"Gorgeously crafted stories."—Nancy Pearl, NPR

"Hauntingly beautiful."—Booklist

"Unpredictable and poetic work."—The Plain Dealer

Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of a Story Prize finalist collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, and four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner China Mountain Zhang and New York Times editor's choice Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Incisive, contemporary, and always surprising, McHugh's second collection confronts near-future life with an ironic and particular eye. Her characters live with zombies, struggle to make ends meet on the Arizona–Mexico border, and cope with China's descent into capitalism in stories that stretch the boundaries of imagination."
—Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year

"Superb.... Against backdrops of sheer terror, Ms. McHugh's characters insist on investing themselves in flirtations, friendships and jobs. They keep their innocent curiosity for the world even as it falls to pieces."
—Wall Street Journal

“The best stories in this mesmerizing collection from the L.A. writer are the ones that elude categorization—the struggles of a troubled doll maker in “Useless Things,” the fantasies of an impulsive man in “Going to France.” It’s the ordinary and everyday that we should be afraid of, not the prospect of big explosions and world-ending catastrophes. This is a pro stretching a genre to its limits—subverting, inverting, perverting, disturbing.”
—Los Angeles Magazine

“McHugh brings a subtle grittiness to the end of days. There is no post-apocalyptic glamour in these post-apocalyptic tales.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Hugo-winner McHugh (Mothers & Other Monsters) puts a human face on global disaster in nine fierce, wry, stark, beautiful stories. . . . As McHugh’s entirely ordinary characters begin to understand how their lives have been transformed by events far beyond their control, some shrink in horror while others are “matter of fact as a heart attack,” but there is no suicidal drama, and the overall effect is optimistic: we may wreck our planet, our economies, and our bodies, but every apocalypse will have an “after” in which people find their own peculiar ways of getting by.”
—Publishers Weekly (*starred review*)

“Like George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 1996), McHugh displays an uncanny ability to hook into our prevailing end-of-the-world paranoia and feed it back to us in refreshingly original and frequently funny stories. In these nine apocalyptic tales, people facing catastrophes, from a zombie plague to a fatal illness contracted from eating chicken nuggets, do their best to cope. In “Useless Things,” perhaps the most affecting story in the collection, a resourceful sculptor, worried about drought and money in a time of high unemployment and increasing lawlessness, turns her exquisite crafstmanship to fashioning sex toys and selling them on the Internet with the hope of making enough money to pay her property taxes. In “Honeymoon,” a participant in a medical trial that goes horribly wrong watches in horror as six men are hospitalzed in critical condition; she uses her payment to take a vacation because, when all was said and done, she “wanted to dance. It didn’t seem like a bad choice.” That survival instinct is what makes McHugh’s collection a surprisingly sunny read in spite of the global disasters that threaten at every turn. An imaginative homage to the human ability to endure.”
—Booklist (*starred review*)

About the Author

Maureen F. McHugh: Maureen F. McHugh has lived in NYC, Shijiazhuang, China, Ohio, Austin, Texas, and now lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of a collection, Mothers & Other Monsters (Story Prize finalist), and four novels, including China Mountain Zhang (Tiptree Award winner) and Nekropolis (a New York Times Editor’s Choice). McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Small Beer Press (November 8, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931520291
• ISBN-13: 978-1931520294
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Maureen F. McHugh has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New York Times Editor's Choice. McHugh is working on two novels, BabyGoth and Coming of Age in America. BabyGoth is a mother-daughter story: the Ya-Ya Sisterhood meets Alcoholics Anonymous. Coming of Age in America is a near future coming of age story -- and a romance. Chloe is a trailer park girl at a nice college. Derek is a rejuvenated 72-year-old returning student. McHugh teaches writing at the John Carroll University in Cleveland and at the Imagination and Clarion workshops. She and her husband and two dogs used to live next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins looked over the fence at them. Now she lives in Austin, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the end, December 1, 2011

By 

wogan "the book reader" - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: After the Apocalypse: Stories (Paperback)

This collection of stories is labeled After the Apocalypse. It is really not what most would expect; for the most part it deals with individual disaster. There are 9 stories.
One does deal with zombies, but they seem to be under control, another about a young girl in China trying to get a job after a bird flu plague, a lady living out west during economic hard times, a young boy with amnesia after a dirty bomb goes off, computer problems, people flying to France(literally), a medical test gone wrong, one with a mother who has contracted disease and the last what most would expect - a mother and her child trying to get to Canada after the breakdown of society.

The reoccurring theme seems to be a scarcity of power. People are existing, living and getting by no matter what. For most it is a mundane tale of an aftermath of an event that had the power to change lives. For many one can see no moral to the story and sometime no hope - just existence.
If you are hoping for huge catastrophic worldwide descriptions of an apocalypse this is not the book for you. It is more of a literary style of stories of existence.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books of 2011, hands down, November 9, 2011

By 

Justin Landon "JDiddyEsquire" (Washington DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After the Apocalypse: Stories (Paperback)

I get e-mails from time to time offering me electronic copies of small press titles for review. I usually say yes, with the caveat that I may never actually read it or get past the first chapter. Most of them aren't my cup of tea. Once in a while though there's a real home run. After the Apocalypse, a collection of short stories by Maureen F. McHugh, is a home run.

I'd never heard of McHugh prior to receiving an e-mail about her collection (which is my fault). It turns out she's published four novels and over twenty short stories. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. In 1996 she won a Hugo Award for her short story The Lincoln Train. After reading this collection, none of that surprises me. Many of the stories in this collection are "award worthy" - especially the three new ones that are published here for the first time.

As the title implies, all of the stories in this collection deal with what comes after the apocalypse. Notice that's a lower case apocalypse. While some of the stories delve into the aftermath of the "big-one", some are more about a personal cataclysm. All of them are told from a very tight point of view in a consistently haunting prose. McHugh's characters are all real people, with real problems, who lived before she opened the window into their story and will continue to live after it's closed. It's rare that I enjoy short fiction this much. It's even more rare when I'd put a 200 page short story collection against any novel I've read this year.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Possibly the Best Collection of 2011, January 28, 2012

By 

S. Duke "SMD" (Placerville, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After the Apocalypse: Stories (Paperback)

Collections of short stories are still the hardest thing for me to review, which invariably means the following review will be flawed both methodologically and stylistically. But perhaps I can move past this by way of the interconnected-ness of the stories in Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse. Unlike most collections, McHugh's stories revolve around the same premise in the same world: something has gone terribly wrong with our world; the nine stories in After the Apocalypse are about those who have survived, or are surviving.

That's essentially what this collection is about: how human beings respond to catastrophe. But, mostly, the collection about survival, without all the exotic images our post-apocalyptic movies show us. There are no grand heroes here, nor an assurance that "things are turning around." These are stories caught in the middle between the moment of catastrophe, the moment
immediately after, and the intermediate moments between "the world as it was" and "the better world to come." And it's that focus which makes After the Apocalypse one of the most beautiful literary feats of 2011.

Despite following a similar theme, each of McHugh's stories is distinct in vision and voice, from a young man imprisoned in a city compound infested with zombies in "The Naturalist" to a woman trying to make a living in the wastelands along the U.S. border with Mexico in "Useless Things"; from Chinese women trying to free themselves from indentured labor to Chinese corporations in "Special Economics" to a magazine-style article about a young man who survived a dirty bomb attack, but lost his identity in "The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large"; from two computer programmings debating whether their AI is trying to communicate in "The Kingdom of the Blind" to the sudden and strange shared desire for travel to France in "Going to France"; from a young woman's attempts to make something of her life after a failed marriage in "Honeymoon" to a family struggling through the after-effects of a time-dilated disease spread through food in "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" to, finally, a woman and her young daughter struggling their way north after America's economy and borders collapse, and also struggling with themselves in "After the Apocalypse." The variety of perspectives and content produces a palimpsest of narrative; in other words, each story seems to layer on top of the one that proceeded it, turning what in other collections would be a disparate set of worlds viewed through a particular gaze into a set of stories that feel inherently collaborative. What one story cannot do due to the limits of space, the next might.

Paul Kincaid has argued that "McHugh's approach to the apocalypse is oblique, a concern with the personal, the individual or family unit, rather than the devastation that surrounds them" (from Strange Horizons). He's right. The palimpsest that is McHugh's collection is perhaps driven by the intense personal nature of her narratives. No story in this collection is about the apocalypse-that-was. We never see the events that led McHugh's characters to a relatively solitary life along the border ("Useless Things") or to make a break for the city to make something of herself ("Special Economics"). We only learn about the catastrophes in retrospect, often through the eyes of characters who no more know what happened than any of us can say, with any certainty, what exactly happened on 9/11. Complex events are compressed into single-strain narratives. The effect is wondrous, if not because it's refreshing to see a different approach to catastrophe/apocalypse, then certainly because McHugh's stories, by and large, are beautiful.

That's not to suggest that every story in this collection succeeds in what I've interpreted as a narratory path. "Honeymoon" leaves something to be desired, though the only reason I can muster is that the story never felt like it belonged in the collection, and, perhaps, in comparison to stories like "Special Economics," "Useless Things," or "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces," it falls short of the mark, both on a personal and narrative level. Similarly, "The Kingdom of the Blind" and "Going to France," while interesting enough, don't quite approach the grim personal nature of the other stories in the collection. The personal, I think, is where McHugh shines, as demonstrated by "The Naturalist" (the criminal), "Special Economics" (the exploited), "Useless Things" (the struggling), "The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large" (the broken survivor), "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" (those who survive the dead or dying), and "After the Apocalypse" (the disconnected). These stories provide a kind of funhouse mirror in which to examine humanity, distorted through a world that just might be. The effect is chilling and humbling, because McHugh shows us how fragile, and yet beautiful and unique, human beings really.

After the Apocalypse is a thorough, if not unsettling, journey into the human psyche after catastrophe, at once thrilling, compelling, and disturbing. This collection alone proves that McHugh is a force to be reckoned with in the world of genre, for her simple-but-beautiful prose, evocative imagery, and raw human explorations make After the Apocalypse one of the best works of SF of this decade. You can expect to see this book appear in my WISB Awards in February.