A Bewildering Passage: A Guest Post by Peter Heller

An introspective dystopian tale about friendship, survival and uncertainty in a world that is falling apart. Thrilling, emotionally probing and thought-provoking, this novel not only points out the trials of a post-apocalyptic world but the beauty and untamed grace of nature. Read on for an exclusive essay from Peter Heller on writing Burn.

When I am starting a new novel I never have a grand idea, or a plot, or even a place or character. I just start with a first line whose tone and cadence intrigue and in some way enchant me. The first few lines have to invoke a sort of music. 

When I sat down to write what became the book Burn, I wrote, “He let the fire burn down to embers, let the dark envelope him, and stood.” I liked it. It had heft and rhythm and a suggestion of high stakes. The man’s name was Jess. He stepped to the edge of the trees and soon there was mention of a bridge that had been blown and a burned village. In a few minutes his friend Storey showed up after scouring boats below for food. They had come out of the woods after a week of hunting and were clearly in dire straits. Yikes. This was apocalyptic. I was in my wheelhouse and I began to write in a white heat.

Soon I discovered more charred towns, overturned cars; bloodstained tarmac, almost no bodies. I called my agent in New York, David Halpern. I said, “Hey, do you think this is aliens?”

“I don’t know, keep writing.”

It was scary. Like my characters, I had no idea what was going on. I found out that they were way up in Maine, in that vast country of woods and lakes not too far from the border. So then I thought it might be Canadians. They’d been so polite and nice for so long, maybe they just snapped and invaded.

Jess and Storey soon discovered that Maine had seceded from the United States. It was a chilling revelation given the political mood in the country, maybe more frightening than close encounters or crazed Canadians because it didn’t seem so unlikely. I continued to write, and as I traveled with the two men through a territory ravaged by violence and heartbreak I encountered something surprising and beautiful. The men had grown up as neighbors a mile apart on a dirt road in Southern Vermont, had been classmates from kindergarten through twelfth grade. They had played attackers on the same soccer teams and were so in sync that by the time they reached high school almost no one could beat them. They had crushes on the same girls, spent scores of nights at each other’s dinner tables, helped each other’s families get the wood in. I became awed by how they handled each other in crisis, how resilient was the friendship when a terrible secret was revealed, how they coped when they found a child along the way.

It was one of the most thrilling journeys of my life. An adventure like few others, which you might think strange–since I seem to have written it, and might have foreseen everything that happened. But I didn’t. There were four of us on that bewildering passage, Jessie and Storey and I, and little Collie.