What Inspired Weep The Post-Apocalyptic Series

I consider myself an accidental horror writer because the story for Weep came from a plan to kill my friend.

It's 2010 in Galway and I've just realised that a degree in marine biology probably won't be the fast track to becoming David Attenborough I thought it would be. Turns out there's more maths and physics than fishing. Add in being a skint student and the only thing left for me to do for my friend Ryan's birthday was to plot his murder – on paper.

We loved horror. You could chart our best movie or game nights by the spikes in the electricity bill. If the lights stayed on, the neighbours knew we found some good spookies. Our favourite game was deciding how quickly we’d check out if we landed in these stories. If we woke up aboard the spaceship in Alien, it would be rock-paper-scissors to see who went out the airlock first. In The Thing, we’d barely make it past the opening credits before we were making snow angels until hypothermia took us.

Pure, daft realism. When the news anchor in a zombie film started going on about unseasonably high and strange flu cases, we knew we’d already be at home in our comfies, crocheting matching nooses. So for Ryan’s birthday, I wrote a short story where the zombie apocalypse is just kicking off, but Ryan decides he’s done with the trouble before it even begins.

It was absurd. Where other fictional characters pour all their energy and creativity into survival, we put just as much effort into planning our endings at the first in story inconvenience.

The idea stuck. What makes characters in these situations decide to continue? When the character knows he can't succeed, and we assume he probably won't, but he'll still try. Why? I wrote Weep to find out.

I never gave Ryan the story. I brought pizza and beer to celebrate instead, which carries the same emotional weight as one irish man writing another Irish man a short story. I felt awkward sharing creative work. But since learning that people wrote books for a living, that's what I've wanted to do. People with the best of intentions advised me to do something more realistic, but when becoming David Attenborough failed, sure I might as well give this a go.

Ryan’s short story will appear in part during Weep Banshee. The character is introduced in the Weep Lost Letters short story ‘Riverside Cottage.’

I should state, he’s still alive.