The Deluge, apocalypse in slow motion
Interview conducted by Payal Parekh, climate justice expert
Born in 1983, Stephen Markley is an American journalist and author, whose first acclaimed novel Ohio (2018) focused on a single night in a blue-collar town. He has established himself as a formidable cartographer of contemporary America and its fractures. The novel is currently being adapted for television in the United States. His second and latest novel The Deluge is a dystopian epic about climate change that takes the entire planet as its stage. It’s a huge map to the madness of humanity’s near-future spanning the years 2013 through to the 2030s. 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. No bookseller would place this in the horror section of the store, but it is profoundly frightening, nonetheless. This bleak vision of ecological and technological turmoil in the coming decades is mesmerizing and compassionate. According to Stephen King, Stephen Markley’s latest novel is “prophetic, terrifying, uplifting”.