Princes Risborough Author Suzie Kearley pens pandemic novel

She started looking for a publisher at the start of 2020, with no idea that a real pandemic was on the cards.

It seems surreal then, one year on, that her novel 'Pestilence' has been published, about a fungal pathogen, which brings about the end of the world!

Suzie said: "I started writing the book when I was 16 years old in 1990. At the time, I couldn't work out the ending, so it sat on the shelf for 20 years.

"When I became a freelance writer in 2011, I decided to sort out the manuscript.

"I typed it up with help from dictation software, and worked out the ending. It then sat on my PC for another eight years, occasionally benefitting from read throughs, revisions and edits when I had the time and inclination.

"In 2019 I took two months off work to finish the job, and in January 2020, I started looking for an agent or publisher. Then Covid hit."

In many ways, the story bears little relation to covid - it makes the actions of our government look brilliant, compared to the incompetent government in her novel.

But there are elements that ring true, from people not taking the threat seriously, to vested interests taking precedent over public safety.

The novel, set partly in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, takes the reader on a dystopian journey, following scientists as they develop a miracle cure for antibiotic resistance, which turns out to be humanity's downfall.

Visit the bunker at Air Command, and a healing commune in the Chiltern Hills, as the characters take you on a journey of apocalyptic proportions to the end of the civilised world!

We asked Suzie if she had predicted the future with her novel, but she wasn't so sure.

She said: "It's been a very long time in the making.

"Back in 1990, I was inspired by the success of James Herbert's Rats, and Shaun Hutson's Slugs. I wanted to create a disastrous situation, for an apocalyptic story. My book however, is a thriller, not a horror (my horror ideas/scenes got deleted, because they weren't very good!).

"It was a bit weird that we actually found ourselves in a pandemic, while I was awaiting feedback from agents and publishers.

"It's been very different situation however, to the situation in my book.

"After the real pandemic began there was a surge in interest in pandemic stories, because Dean Koontz had predicted a Wuhan Virus in the 1980s, and Peter May's Lockdown was finally published, so I was keen to get my story out there!"

This isn't Susie's first book,

She commented: :"I have written quite a number of books, but this is my first novel. In June 2020, A Grand Tour of Scotland in a Freedom Caravan was published, and Memories of the Second World War, featuring the wartime memories of a number of local people was published in 2015.

"I have books on freelance writing and spiritual topics too."

Readers can see them all here: www.amazon.co.uk/Susie-Kearley/e/B00H6EI87UBuy Pestilence by Susie Kearley on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08S982M5L