I’ve always found the end of the world appealing. (Well, the idea of the end of the world. I could do without the real thing, which unfortunately seems closer each day.) There’s something attractive about wiping the slate clean and getting back to basics. It’s almost as if the apocalypse represents a beginning rather than an ending to me.
Add monsters to that mix and you’ve really got my attention.
The monsters in my story for the Stephen Jones-edited anthology <em>The Mammoth Book of Monsters (published May 2007 by Carroll and Graf in the U.S. and Hutchinson in the UK) represent my favorite supernatural creatures. (Again, in idea only. Though they have often been the stuff of my actual nightmares, I have no desire to run into them in real life.) As is usual with my stories of monsters, it can be a little unclear who the real monsters are, us or them. But luckily, at the end of the world, we might have a shot at that question being answered.
“The Man He Had Been Before” was reprinted in my zombie collection What Will Come After.