I Think We’ve Been Here Before by Suzy Krause
I wanted to write a book about the end of the world — the end end, not a book where it almost ends and someone saves it, or one where it could end if these shadows remain unaltered, or even one where the earth is destroyed but the humans escape to another planet. I wanted to blow it all up.
The first problem, I knew, was that disaster fiction was well outside of my wheelhouse. I didn’t write disaster novels — unless you count disasters of the heart, disasters of the social or relational kind, the quieter, more personal disasters that are broken engagements or panic attacks. But this novel was a disaster novel, and it was one I couldn’t push to the side. It came to me in a dream, literally, and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
I had the dream over and over again, monthly, then weekly, sometimes two nights in a row. It was an objectively terrifying one: I was standing on a hill with the people I love, watching an asteroid advance steadily toward us. We knew, in the dream, that we were about to die and we had our arms around each other, watching this thing come closer and closer. Sometimes, in the dream, I would be apologizing to someone, or they would apologize to me, but always our issues would resolve in time. Sometimes we were silent together, sometimes we were reminiscing about our lives.
They say you never die in dreams, but I died in that one every time. It was a warm, soft death, not like falling asleep, not slipping into unawareness, but like being enveloped by something that had no edges.
It might sound strange, but I loved that dream. I’d always wake up feeling calm and comforted, wishing I could climb back into it. I knew it should scare me, but it never did. I wondered if I could recreate that feeling in a book. Was ‘cozy apocalyptic’ a genre?
I wrote up a book proposal and sent it to my agent. I wrote, it’s going to be a bit of a different one from me this time. Everyone’s going to die in the end. But it’s still going to be kind of funny, I think? And hopeful. And…cozy. Cozy apocalyptic, is that a thing?
An email from my agent: she’d passed the proposal along to my publisher, and they weren’t completely sure about it. It sounded cool, they said, but maybe too gloomy? A book where everyone dies in the end?
Everyone?
A writer friend weighed in: It does sound like kind of a downer, Suzy.
And she had a point: isn’t the world terrible enough? People want escapism! People want to believe, in their free time, on their vacations and in their cozy reading nooks, that all is not lost, that they’re invincible and that everything good lasts forever.
And while I knew that, I couldn’t help but wonder if people might not mind this, if I could execute it the way I was envisioning — if I could make them feel the way I’d felt in my dream. It was like I had a bear for a pet and I just wanted to introduce it to people. Give it a chance! What could possibly be more comforting than being made to face something commonly considered terrifying and finding out it was friendly? Cute, even?
Wonder of wonders: my publisher bought the book that became I Think We’ve Been Here Before. I celebrated, then got to work.
If selling that book was hard, writing it was harder. The first draft was not comforting; it was disjointed and strange and it made no sense. I tried to make it less disturbing by cutting things and softening things, but for some reason that only made it worse. I spent many afternoons staring at my screen, regretting all of the promises I’d made. Cozy? Funny? Comforting? What had I been thinking? Dreams are not books. Death is not cozy.
The lucky thing about recurring dreams is that … well, they recur. I had the dream again, right in the nick of time, and when I woke up, I sat with it. What was it about that dream that felt so good?
I made notes:
- I was with all of my people.
- We’d made our amends; we didn’t have anything else we needed to do.
- The end was inevitable; we didn’t have anything else we could do.
- It wasn’t just a dream about the lead-up to death — it was a dream with death in it. It struck me that, just as I had said to my publisher, let me send you this book, it sounds scary but it’s not, my dream had said to me, let me show you death, it sounds scary but it’s not.
That was the key ingredient, I realized: not veering away at the last minute. Not trying to protect the reader, but letting them see. Because when you really come up to it and look it in its face, death itself is the most eventual, natural, common thing. Is it awful? Yes — the most awful, for the people you leave behind. Is it possible to make peace with it? Also yes. I really do think so.
The early reviews have been coming in, and I hold my breath every time I start to read one. Intent is one part of the equation, but you can’t control how other people receive your words. You can imagine my relief — my delight — at the number of reviews containing the words ‘cozy,’ ‘comforting,’ and ‘funny.”
Maybe cozy apocalyptic could be a thing after all?
Publish Date: December 1, 2024
Genre: Fiction
Author: Suzy Krause
Page Count: 317 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
ISBN: 978-1662517525