Seek Immediate Shelter: A Guest Post by Vincent Yu

After a false alarm causes a town to spiral into chaos and confusion, the community confronts the harsh truths of their panicked decisions in this clever, thought-provoking story of survival, loyalty and betrayal that was inspired by real events. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Vincent Yu on writing Seek Immediate Shelter.

 

A BREATHTAKING DEBUT novel about survival, hope, and second chances in an Asian American community in Massachusetts, when a false missile throws the residents' lives into chaos.

 

Seek Immediate Shelter began as a series of questions I couldn’t stop posing to myself: How would I react if I thought I might die at any moment? If I had an unknown but sharpy limited amount of time to assert myself as a living person?

Such questions have always served as a starting point for my writing, spurring the creation of characters who are dropped into pressure-cooker situations, who confront similar choices while being put through their narrative paces. It’s all very much like an experiment, whose end result is often greater self-knowledge.

Of course, every experiment requires a set of conditions. When I learned of the ballistic missile alert sent in error to Hawaii in 2018, I realized I had the perfect instigating event—one of high drama and moral complexity. Something powerful enough to split a life into before and after. What would a person’s reaction to such an alert say about them? And how would they need to reconcile their understanding of themselves once the alert was retracted?

This book was originally a short story. As I wrote, however, I found that the durability of the premise, its wide applicability, and its capacity to say something about an entire community, necessitated a fuller view of the event. I needed an entire cast of characters, all of whom would receive the alert, and whose responses would capture a broad, believable swathe of humanity.  

Since I grew up in Western Massachusetts, I decided to send the alert to a fictionalized version of my hometown, in order to really accentuate the tension and dramatic fallout of such a cataclysmic incident in so small a community. At the same time, I wanted to capture the beauty of the region—my home—with its yearly cadences, its drastic seasonal shifts, and the neighborly ethos of its residents.

The characters in Seek Immediate Shelter thrive and suffer; they betray each other; they love wildly, without abandon, and at times without requital; they struggle with impossible decisions; they wonder at the abject strangeness of being alive; they contend with intersecting identities; they discover themselves; they manage. 

It is a surreal honor, now, to know that they are out in the world, and that they are finding readers who, in turn, find them flawed, perhaps lovable, perhaps heroic, but ultimately human.  It is truly all I’ve ever wanted. Thank you so much for reading and bearing witness to them.  Thank you.