Telling The Right Story at the Right Time: A Surprise Hit Becomes a Series, Then an Omnibus

With the omnibus version of his critically-acclaimed hit dystopian series A Quiet Apocalypse officially out tomorrow, Dave Jeffery reflects on how the acclaimed stories that centre the Deaf community came to be.

It was a line that beguiled, a book that enthralled, and a catalyst for my desire to write a story set in a dystopian world. I read 1984 in the winter of 1974, a ten-year-old kid in a council estate high rise in the Black Country, watching from our balcony nine floors up as the bleak, almost Orwellian landscape played out in the world below. But it would be over 45 years later that I would finally sit down to write my own version of a contrived yet dysfunctional society; a device by which to explore the nature of humanity at a point of existential crisis.

The ‘A Quiet Apocalypse’ (AQA) series is an attempt to understand how the human condition is affected by great trauma and what it takes to overcome it, what it takes to survive. There are no monsters, no zombie hoards, no alien invasion. There’s no need for outlandish antagonists, because the horrors being inflicted, and indeed incurred,have their foundations in people: their actions, and their attempts to make sense of what has happening to them. AQA does feature the virus MNG-U, or ‘Meningitis Unspecified’. It also features a surviving deafened population, as well as a few who can still hear—now enslaved as mere commodity for those who are deafened, and those from the Deaf Community, punished as scapegoats for the New World Order.

But one thing important to the AQA series is that humanity’s tendency for abhorrence is only matched by its incredible sense of compassion. Simply put, humanity can be its own worst enemy and still be its greatest saviour. 

The Surprise Series That Came At Just The Right Time

So how did I get here? Well, the hook of a virus that deafens the world came to me back in 1998, when working as a mental health nurse with the Deaf Community in the West Midlands. Over a ten year period I witnessed first-hand the community’s fight against cultural oppression and the medicalisation of their Deafness by a hearing world. The idea of a story that explored the suppression of Deaf culture was so powerful, I knew I had to write it—but the concept was big, and I didn’t know how to best approach it in a meaningful, sensitive way. So, I put it on hold for a decade, revisiting it a few times but ending up dissatisfied with the results.

Then an opportunity came that gave me the focus I needed to finally get the story down. I was invited to contribute to an anthology with the theme of great loss and how people adapted and coped with it. As it turned out, the anthology never materialised, but I did have the story. Well, for a little while at least; before it fell foul of the great MS Windows update of 2010! However, I was left with the file containing the original outline. I should’ve been annoyed—I admit there may have been a few expletives at the time—but then reality hit. No matter how much I thought I had nailed down the core concepts in that story, I’d felt the piece needed to be longer. So, I wrote the novella to prove the point, to myself if no one else.

I’d be lying if I said I always planned for AQA to be a series. That came afterwards, when the response to the first book was so unexpectedly positive, given that it was written before (and released during) the Covid pandemic. It also went against the grain, irking some traditionalists, who preferred a grittier, down-the-line apocalyptic tale. Rather than deter, such responses told me that I was doing something different; to me, a factor that has always inferred progressive challenge to trite convention. And when others wanted to know more about the world beyond the confines established in book one, I wrote the first drafts of CaTHEDRAL (book two) and The SaMARITAN (book three) back-to-back during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. 

Just as it was for many, this was an emotionally gruelling period in my life, and in many ways set the tone for the books themselves, digging deeper into the psyche, and ultimately, the darker side of human nature. The upshot was a trilogy of novellas that seemingly could do no wrong with its readership. Yet, I found that spending so much time in that universe had also left me in a dark place. The content of those books was way outside my comfort zone and if it is possible to self-incur vicarious trauma through the behaviours of the characters you create as a writer, then I believed I was experiencing it in spades. It is true to say that, after completing The SaMARITAN, I didn’t write anything for two months, a premise unheard of to anyone who knows me. While it sounds like a cliche, the only way I could see to shake the melancholy was to write the final novella and do it in such a way that I could cleanse my sullied soul of the horrific events of those first three tales. TRIBUNaL was that book and did indeed do what I asked of it, certainly in terms of improving my psychological wellbeing

By Popular Demand: The Full Collection

So why have I decided to put these four novellas (and an origin story co-written with my son, Tom) into a single volume called MONUMENT? The idea has been on the table for a few years, with Demain Publishing very keen to put it into action. When I was writing TRIBUNaL, there was something to be said for creating a sense of chronology to the events that occurred in that book and its predecessors. The natural progression was a self-contained volume where fans of the original books, and those who have expressed a desire to read the series based on word-of-mouth recommendations online, could become immersed in this world without pause, and hopefully heighten the intensity of the AQA experience. From what fans have said so far, they are very much hoping the same thing! 

MONUMENT is released as an eBook tomorrow, 13 September, and a paperback version will be available very soon (pictured; cover by artist Roberto Segate, with design by Adrain Baldwin). The core AQA series is done, but I can announce here that I will be writing a final, stand-alone novella set in the AQA universe in collaboration with the wonderful Raven Dane. It will feature one character from the first AQA book, and a character Raven created for the AQA anthology (Demain Publishing, edited by David T Griffith). We’re pretty excited with how it’s going and feel it will be a fitting way to conclude the AQA universe. More details on this project in due course. If the British Fantasy Society would like us to write something about it at a later date, then Raven and I would be more than happy to do so. That’s after I’ve asked Raven if it’s okay with her, of course! 

So, there you have it, a brief history of how AQA came about and why MONUMENT exists. To wrap up this piece, I’d like to say that at the heart of AQA, despite its dark, challenging content and fluid morality, there is redemption, and there is hope. But like all of the curve-balls life can sometimes throw at us, as you make your way through this scarred, dystopian landscape, you may need to dig deep to find them. 

Thanks for reading! 

MONUMENT, The Quiet APOCALYPSE Omnibus, is out tomorrow on eBook from Demain Publishing.