Day 5 of the Apocalypse! Mira Grant, Author of Feed and Parasite + Giveaway

Apocalypse around the blogosphere, day 5:
Rainy Day Ramblings: The Hallowed Ones by Laura Bickle
Love of Books: Contaminated by Em Garner
The Readers Den: The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Whenever I get  asked to name my favorite book of all time, I don't even hesitate before I blurt out: FEED by Mira Grant! If you put aside all the classics that have been stuffed down my throat during my endless education, some of which I actually adored, Feed is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best book I have ever read. So it is with great pride and honor that I welcome Mira Grant to The Nocturnal Library.

    

There is no such thing as "the end of the world." Not unless you're talking with absolute literalism: the end of the world will come when the sun goes nova, when the black hole breathes deep, when the sky burns, when the world where we have lived and died since we crawled out of the muck is finally, mercifully no more. That's the end of the world. If you're being more metaphorical and poetic, then there's no single end: worlds die every die. They die disguised as people or as stories or as bullfrogs, but once they're over, they're over. You can't put a quarter in the slot and start over again (although if you could, I would find life's cheat codes and sell them at the corner of Level 1 and Game Over, quarter a lie, defeat the boss level, become the title character). Worlds end all around us, all the time. That's the awesome thing about worlds. We have more than we can ever know.

Because see, when you make the end of the world a literalist thing, it becomes a lot less fun. How can I enjoy destroying the human race if I know that in so doing, I have also destroyed the world? That's a lot to live up to. Literal destruction happens only once, with a bang or a whimper, and then you need to find something else to do. I recommend kicking off the next Big Bang, since then you can be the Alpha and the Omega and all that other mythic crap, and at least that's something to put in your author bio. "Destroyed creation. Created creation. Author of six novels, one religion, various poems, and the cat." (No, I don't know how you author the cat. You're the one who's restarting the universe here. Figure it out.)

So why, if it's so much bother, do we destroy the world at all? Figurative destruction doesn't get the job done; literal destruction does it too well. It seems like a waste of time when looked at that way, when in fact that's the reason to destroy the world in the first place: because the apocalypse is transitory. It's an opportunity to stretch our wings and fly over burning nations, testing out the various futures that we hope will never come to pass (or at least won't come to pass during our lifetimes; even the most enthusiastic doom-sayers enjoy warm beds and cool porches and lemonade made with real lemons, which are all quite scarce after the end of days).

So we end the world. We end it in fire and we end it in ice; we end it with viruses and we end it with alien invasions. We break our toys with hammers only to glue them back together again, making them uniquely our own. Writing the apocalypse is a way of finding the bearing strain of creation, and that's wonderful, because it teaches us so much about ourselves and the world we live in.

Also because it's fun to hear the pretty smashing sounds. But that's the answer we don't give when we have company over. Mustn't scare the neighbors, after all.

Born and raised in Northern California, Mira Grant has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the Swamp Cannibals scenario remains unchallenged.

Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

Mira sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests that you do the same.

Mira also writes as Seanan McGuire.

Aaaand it's giveaway time again! Enter to win a Mira Grant book of your choice. The giveaway is INTERNATIONAL, anywhere The Book Depository ships. Thanks so much for reading and entering, guys. Now I'm off to find a quiet corner and fangirl until I drop!

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