“Blood Locusts” by David L. Updike appeared in Issue 45 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
Our culture is steeped in conspiracy theories—black helicopters, FEMA camps, microchipped vaccines. There’s also a lot of projection in our political discourse—people accuse their perceived enemies of doing the things they themselves are doing or secretly wish to do. With that in mind, I wanted to write a near-future story that combined dystopian technology with extreme religious belief. I took inspiration from a verse in the Book of Revelation, which I decided to give a very literal interpretation. Unfortunately, recent events make the story feel more relevant now than when I wrote it a couple of years ago.
What was the most difficult part in finishing this story?
I think for me it was finding the right moral tone. I wanted the reader to sympathize with a protagonist who is far from heroic. He’s just trying to survive in an impossible situation, deal with loss, and find a reason to carry on. That’s most of us in a time of crisis, but we demand more from our fictional characters than we do from ourselves.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
There are so many. It’s a great time to be reading and writing strange fiction. I’m currenlty enjoying The Black Maybe, a collection of “liminal tales” by Hungarian author Attila Veres. Ask me tomorrow and I’ll probably give you a different answer.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
David Sedaris. We all need a good laugh these days.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I just keep writing my strange little stories and sending them out. I write short fiction because (a) that’s what I love to read, and (b) I actually stand a chance of finishing them. Someday soon, I’d like to publish the best of them as a collection.
Our thanks to David for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Blood Locusts” here.
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David L. Updike’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Chicago Quarterly Journal, Philadelphia Stories, Cleaver, Hobart, Lowestoft Chronicle, Daily Science Fiction, 365 Tomorrows, Journ-E: The Journal of Imaginative Literature, and the anthologies Summer of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Vol. 2; Flash of the Dead; Dead Girls Walking; and The Dancing Plague: A Collection of Utter Speculation. He lives in Philadelphia, where he runs the publications program at an art museum.