The
Post
by
Kevin A. Munoz
Genre:
Dystopian Thriller
Ten
years after the world’s oil went sour and a pandemic killed most of
the population, Sam Edison is the chief of police of The Little Five,
a walled-in community near Atlanta, Georgia. Those who survived share
the world with what are known as hollow-heads: creatures who are no
longer fully human.
A
man and a pregnant teenager arrive at the gate and are welcomed into
the town. They begin to settle in when suddenly both are murdered by
an unknown assailant. In the course of investigation, Chief Edison
discovers that the girl was fleeing a life of sexual slavery, and
that some members of the Atlanta community were complicit in the
human trafficking network that had ensnared her.
In
retaliation for Edison’s discoveries, agents of the network abduct
the stepdaughter of the town’s mayor. Chief Edison and three
companions track the kidnappers to Athens, Georgia, where they
discover that the entire city is engaged in human trafficking. By the
time Edison has recovered the kidnapped girl, the other three
rescuers have been killed, leaving Edison alone to bring the mayor’s
stepdaughter home while evading both human and non-human monsters.
Against such great odds, will Sam ever make it to Little Five alive?
Kevin
Muñoz grew up just outside of Philadelphia. After wandering across
the country for a few years, he received a PhD from Emory University
in 2008. A little later, he decided to leave the academic life behind
to pursue his first passion: writing. He has lived in seven U.S.
states over the years, observing and adopting each new place as
settings and inspiration for his fiction. He spent fifteen years in
Georgia, where the seeds of THE POST were planted. He now lives near
Seattle with his two beagle traveling companions.
I’ve been writing since I was a kid, but the “real work” of
writing began in 1998 when I was 25 years old. But I didn’t start The Post
until 2014, and the story of how it came to be is… well, if not interesting,
then perhaps mildly amusing.
I started work on The Post as a challenge to myself. The
genre isn’t one I’d worked in before, and I was curious to see what it felt
like from the inside. The thing is, “zombie post-apocalyptic fiction” is a
well-trod path. Most stories in the genre focus on the tropes of zombie
invasion and are set during the peak of whatever precipitating disaster sets
the stage for the story. There are some stories, novels, comic books and films
that break the mold, however, to varying degrees. I wanted to break the mold
and then grind it into powder.
The result is what I like to call a “zombie-slash-detective
adventure novel” that has almost nothing to do with zombies. They are there -
on the periphery, and occasionally right up in your face - but they don’t drive
the story and aren’t the main antagonists the characters are facing. Some say
that supernatural monsters, like vampires and werewolves and zombies, are
metaphors for prosaic human evil. But human evil, I find, is more compelling
than any artifice that masks the depravity in the shell of something that is
very obviously not real.
The Post started as a challenge to myself, but it became
something greater, more insistent, the deeper I got into it. This was a story I
really wanted to tell, using all of the practice and skill I’d developed over
the prior 16 years of writing. And now four years later, and a week out, I’m
pretty happy with the result.
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