School's Out Forever

INTRODUCTION

I’D LIKE TO start by apologising.

See, I love these books. Frickin’ love ’em. Obviously, we love all our books equally, here at Abaddon Towers, and I know you’re not supposed to have favourites, but of all the favourites I don’t have, these are among my most illicitly favouritey.

Scott K. Andrews was a happy discovery. When you’re starting a new imprint, inevitably you tap into your networks: you talk to agents, approach authors you already know, tap (in our case) into the talent pool already working for our sister imprint, 2000 AD; try and get some strong titles out there right away. But having sorted out our first couple of commissions, we floated the world bibles for most of our settings out there for people to submit to. Just to see who’d bite.

Scott bit. He gave us a couple of concepts, and his Afterblight Chronicles pitch, School’s Out (which you can see at the back of the book, in the bonus material section), grabbed us. And a future Kitschie nominee was born.

Which makes it sound like he came out of nowhere, but Scott’s prouder than anyone I know that he’s paid his dues and shown his commitment. If there was work, he’s taken it, and given it his all. This is the man who wrote The Unofficial Guide to Dawson’s Creek, and he’s pretty damned proud of that, too.

So why am I apologising?

Scott’s an amazing writer, and he captured the feel of Abaddon right away. We need fast-moving and high-action, and he delivered that in spades. We need dark and gritty, and he was all over it. And most of all, we needed really engaging characters. These books weren’t going to be long, and the pace was going to be relentless; the reader would have to connect with the heroes quickly.

And you will connect with these characters. Shit, you’ll love them. They’ll get under your skin, and you’ll stand with them every step of the way. When they make questionable decisions, you’ll understand, and when they triumph, you’ll glory in it.

And you know what? Some of them are going to die.

Not just the bad guys; not just the compromised ones, or the ones that deserve it. Hell, some of the characters who deserve death aren’t going anywhere. But some of the guys you love the most, who you’ll start mentally planning happy-ever-afters for long before the end of the trilogy, will buy it, messily and alone, and for the cruellest and most arbitrary of reasons. And you’ll be totally blind-sided.

So, yeah. Sorry.

There’s more than a little of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, here, but it’s a grimier, prouder kind of story. I was always bothered by the way the adults represented such perfect civilisation and restraint in Golding’s classic. The adults had to leave the narrative altogether before the kids could really go off the rails; and when the landing party arrives at the end, there’s a sense that it’s all over now, and the wrongs will be righted.

But Andrews’ adults lose their shit roughly five minutes before the kids, when The Cull hits, and it’s up to the kids to take care of things for themselves. And when, as the story unfolds and St Mark’s School for Boys and Girls becomes something real, a symbol for hope, and sympathetic adults start crossing over from the rest of the Afterblight world and try and step in, they get short shrift:

It’s a big “fuck-you” to authority, a statement of intent from a band of young men and women who have lost every guardian, guideline and moral compass their old lives offered and had to build up from scratch, and I promise you you’ll be proud of them.

So again: sorry about what’s coming.