I first wrote about Mike and the plague of angels back in 2012, a little love-letter to Brisbane’s West End and the years I spent wandering Boundary Street looking for snacks at 2:00 AM.
At the time I figured it was one-and-done, a little story about living through a slow and unknowable apocalypse where people made-do with the little scraps of normalcy they could scrounge.
Then 2020 happened, with its bushfires, pandemics, murder hornets, and lockdowns. Huge, disorienting changes that forced us all to rethink day-to-day routines, killed whole sectors of the job market, and made the return-to-normalcy an idea fraud with tension.
And I found myself writing about the angels again, telling stories about people living under the shadow of an unknowable entity looming overhead. Trying to get through the day, knowing they risk being purged and playing to a set of poorly understood rules in an effort to stay safe.
And so the Seraphim Plague stories were born.