“All that is mortal is Godless, all that is human is Flawed”: Will Hill’s ‘After the Fire’

“Go tell that long tongue liar, go and tell that midnight rider, tell the rambler, the gambler, the backbiter, tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down.”

…is the epigraph to this dark little book.

I’ve been thinking about it all week as the Monty Python episode playing out in parliament enters its forty eighth act.

After the Fire is a bewitching exploration of the toxic complexity of cult psychology – of faith, fear, and control – inspired by the 1993 Waco siege, in which 76 members of a Texan religious cult died in an inferno at the apocalyptic culmination of a 52-day stand-off with government forces…

But in its veins and ventricles, it’s really a coming-of-age story about voice, identity, and the reclamation of power from the monsters bred to silence and suppress.

“Paranoia. Fear. Behind it all, time and again, at the root of everything. Fear, and control.”

At the beating heart of the book is Moonbeam. She’s a victim of horrific trauma, and yet is never reduced to this identity (as she may have been in lesser hands). Infinitely complex and vulnerable, she’s never victimised, nor infantilised, but is instead a sarcastic, calculating, aching, amorphous nebula of rage, utterly racked by guilt and grief, yet equipped with the kind of courage that runs deep as the bone marrow.

And this courage blazes from her very first scene when we see her sear all the skin off her hand seizing the red-hot metal of the door behind which the other children are trapped at the apocalyptic height of the fire itself, to the moment she sprints into the fortress at the heart of the inferno to save her friend. Without hesitation, she storms into this monument to the oppression that has locked their community in a vice her entire life, brainwashed to believe it to be the literal house of the Lord, and comes face to face with the monster who stole her freedom, ruined her mother’s life, and imprisoned them all – the monster she was promised to marry.

The broiling catharsis of this moment… amidst the blood, the flame, the gore… it’s a gut punch, if you’ve ever faced off for the first time with someone who has controlled, pressured, shamed, ridiculed, and manipulated your every move, who has robbed you of your identity for years. When your legs go suddenly numb, your hands shaking, hyper-stressed muscles twitching all over the town, blood roaring in your ears, heart trying to pulverise your ribs. And the world comes crashing down around you.

Moonbeam got her moment, she got to reclaim her power. And it wasn’t fear or fury alone to read such a moment, it was fuel.

Throughout the story, Moonbeam is also haunted by a vision of verdant green and cornflower blue in which she stands on a cliff with her mother by a cottage above an ocean she has never seen and watches the waves, completely free. It serves as a vivid evocation of all that has been denied her in two colours not often seen amidst the grim greys and reds and browns and oranges of the desert compound with its pale white oak, endlessly patrolled by the centurions anointed so by Father John, where you get locked in a box in the hot sun if you defy one of his holy proclamations. It is also the only image she can ever paint, which reminds me of Richard in The Secret History, and how it becomes the only story he can ever tell.

As the narrative jumps back and forth between before and after the fire, Moonbeam is interviewed by a doctor and an agent.

“I knew – I’ve always known – that the subject of my own Faith, in Father John and the Legion and everything else, would come up eventually. But right now, in this room at this moment in front of these men, it feels like I might just as well cut out my heart and show it to them.”

One of my favourite scenes is Moonbeam’s reaction to Luke, the most tragic fallen angel in their twisted hell, after he assaults her friend, Honey. “Calm. Careful. Triumphant” is her mantra as, with nerves of maraging steel, she steals out of her room in the dead of night, slips like a shadow across the starlit yard, and creeps into his room, wielding her father’s knives, their handles emblazoned with purple and yellow sunsets. She presses one blade to his throat, the other between his legs, and hisses in his ear that if he ever goes near another sister she’ll come back and leave him bleeding like a castrated bull.

This moment is so powerful because retribution would typically be given, especially by male authors, to a character like Nate, the knight archetype. But even in the sickening furnace of a patriarchal hellscape, Moonbeam’s agency is her own.

Speaking of that friendship between Moonbeam and Honey, it’s refreshing as frozen lemonade in summer’s stickiest oven to see a female supporting character in a male-authored first person POV YA novel have such a baroque and strident presence on the page.

“He’s not dead,” says Honey, as though she can read my mind. “I checked. He just looks it.”

I grimace. “That’s not funny.”

She gives me a look that makes me feel about a foot tall.

“I know that, Moonbeam,” she says. “None of this is funny.”

In short, After the Fire is a masterclass in storycraft, with the intricate lattice weaving past and present echoing VE Schwab’s sorcery in the Villains duology. Gorgeously wrought novels are just such a privilege to read, and that itch to immediately reach for a blank page in their wake quite frankly makes life worth living.

“Blood rarely makes for happy endings, but it almost always makes for better stories.”

Will Hill also has a short story in the new Outcast Hours anthology set on an LA rooftop one dystopian eve when an old man teeters on the brink of oblivion. Dip in for your daily existential crisis.

“…there’s a paintbrush in my hand and it’s dripping with cornflower blue and I know I’m dreaming but I don’t care because I don’t want to wake up. I paint the wooden wall in front of me and I hear the distant crash of waves at the base of the cliff and I smell smoke as it rises from the chimney and I know that if I look down I’ll see green grass beneath my feet, but I don’t look down. I paint the wooden board in front of me, and the one next to it, and the one next to that…”

Bonus rec section

Cross-genre things After the Fire put me in mind of which you will also love if you loved it and vice versa – same energy:

• The OA – the character of Luke in particular in After the Fire reminds me of Steve in The OA if he hadn’t found Nina/Prairie/the OA.
• Vicious & Vengeful as mentioned, by VE Schwab – similar ruminations upon mortality and agency.
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt – sumptuous cult of the picturesque vibes.
• The Passage by Justin Cronin – gated community beset by forces of darkness.