Waiting for the lights to go out
Book tells how to survive a pandemic.. and divorce
Writer Ewan Morrison, 52, has been waiting for the apocalypse since he was a little boy.
Researching the 2013 docu-drama American Blackout, about what happens to the US after a devastating cyber attack, convinced him that civilisation is very fragile.
His latest novel, How To Survive Everything, takes the form of a survivalist self-help manual. It’s set in 2025, with another pandemic raging.
The narrator, Hayley, is a teenager who is kidnapped and taken to live off grid by her “prepper” father.
My wife and I live in Glasgow but we’ve got a tiny hideaway in Cove, on the Firth of Clyde past Helensburgh.
We got it after researching American Blackout. We compiled huge dossiers on the structural collapse of society and got freaked out. That’s when we got a hideaway.
Cove was our prepping experiment – we were going to be self-sufficient. But all our carrots developed five fingers. The only thing we grew successfully was rocket.
We also wanted to get the kids away from technology. Like a lot of parents, I felt they were too obsessed with phones. I wanted them to make stone-age axes with a bit of slate and some wood.
One of the main points in survivalists’ and preppers’ manuals is – get away from the city. Find a community that can be trusted and will protect you from other people. But self-sufficiency is not for me, I’m not a farmer.
Even so, at the first sniff of something, we will take our precautions and go back to Cove where we’ve got everything we
■ need – including getting supplies from a farm.
I had started writing another book about catastrophic societal collapse which then turned into this one. At first I told the story through the perspective of the parents but it seemed grim. It came alive when I told it through Hayley. There was so much humour and pathos in a reluctant teenager being dragged into this horrible dystopian potential civilisation collapse. She resists the whole story – can we do yourr apocalypse next week, Dad?
Writing it kept my spirits up during lockdown. Framing it as a manual also let me get in some of the stuff I’ve learned – how to measure the e size of a cut, what bacteria there are in water, how many calories you need in a day, the dangers of FEARS CND poster and Ewan’s book
hypothermia. It also let me include details of how to milk a goat, which is one of the most disgusting things I’ve done.
There is a lot of gallows humour. There is one bit where they have to perform extreme home surgery. The first version was grim beyond belief. Seen through Hayley’s eyes, it was more like the scene in Fargo where they put the body into the woodchipper.
How To Survive Everything is all the apocalypse anxiety I’ve had since I was a kid squeezed into one book. I’ve always had this
weirdly paranoid mindset. I blame my granny and dad. Granny was a hardcore Calvinist with a ouija board hidden under her Damart catalogue. She spoke to spirits.
My father thought the government was monitoring people. He spent his last years living in his attic.
As a kid, he took me to see the banned anti-nuclear film The War Game. That was irresponsible but he was such a hippie, he believed all the values society had were wrong and we should break them. He had a strange but very paranoid paran mindset. It took me years ye to get out of that. I’d just jump ju from one apocalyptic mind mi view to another.
But B the book is also about divorce, div when your kids don’t knowkno who to trust and where the ttruth is coming from. There are lotsl of observations from being a divorced parent myself, all theth things I did wrong, putting my kidski in the zone of conflict.
It’s aabout surviving a divorce as much as surviving a pandemic.