Though the Earth Gives Way, a new novel by Mark Johnson, opens on a man waking up. Bleary with sleep, he assesses his surroundings. “A dusty orange haze hovered over the landscape, such as it was. Parched soil. Leafless sugar maples. Small clumps of meadow grass. Blurs of impressionist color in a land gone brown.”
The man, Elon, is 37, alone, a former radio host wandering through a scorched United States. A climate disaster has left the West Coast a fiery desert, the East Coast underwater, and our beloved Midwest a half-abandoned wasteland for wandering survivors.
“I worried about climate change before I began the book,” Johnson said in a Q&A with his publisher. “I felt a great deal of guilt. I have a wonderful son, a talented music composer. I feel that we’ve failed his generation. As I worked more on the book, I began to hope that maybe the right book, the right set of characters, might help sharpen our focus on the problem.”
Johnson is a health and science reporter for the Journal Sentinel, where he shared the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for “One in a Billion,” a series about a young Milwaukee boy with an unknown medical condition, and the Children’s and Medical College of Wisconsin doctors exploring the far regions of genetic technology to try to help him.
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After wandering alone from his home in Rhode Island, Elon ends up in northern Michigan, where he finds a strange old man living with a group of survivors in a former retreat center. For the first time in years, he unpacks his bag and sets up camp with this new group. The story soon branches beyond Elon, as the eight people at the camp share their stories of survival around a series late-night fires.
“Each night, a story,” Johnson writes. “We would take turns. No stories about rising water or burning sun. No stories about the corpses we’d seen or the miseries we’d endured. Nothing copped from a book or movie. Something real. Something to awaken us from the trance in which we’d walked these many miles, to remind us of what it had meant to be human.”
The group bonds together through sharing their experiences each night and begins to face the possibility of trying to rebuild some form of civilization together.
Though the Earth Gives Way was included USA Today’s 20 winter books “we can’t wait to read.” The novel is available now on Amazon and in bookstores.
