The December Plague stripped thousands of people of their reason and basic humanity for two years. The disease left their bodies mostly untouched but their minds were ravaged by an uncontrollable fury and an insatiable urge to consume any meat they could find. The remaining immune population struggled to withstand the relentless waves of violent Infected until a cure for the disease was found.Neil Newton was one of the Infected. He spent two and a half years ill and trapped in a quarantined hospital until a cure team found him. Recalled to sanity by the cure, he finds the world is not the one he remembers. He wakes up surrounded by strangers in a place he does not recognize. His body is starved and scarred by the unending battles during his illness. His memory of what he has done to survive the past few years begins to return in pieces. And his family, including his eleven-year-old daughter, is missing in the chaos.In the shattered remains of human society, there are no real mechanisms to help him find his young daughter and her mother. No police to track them down. No widespread communications to appeal to for news. There is only a pitiful list of names of those who remain and the few strangers he meets who are willing to help him.The empty country is a vast web of abandoned roads, remaining Infected and dangerous pockets of Immunes who have become desperate as supplies and food dwindle. Neil risks the long trip home, hoping to find his family safe and fearing they'll never be able to accept what he's done to survive. A severe addiction to Post-apocalyptic literature combined with a lifetime of a very rural existence, first in central Maine and now in northern Idaho naturally led to both of Deirdre's novels: The Jade Seed and After the Cure.Deirdre's education in anthropology and peace and conflict studies prompted the central idea for After the Cure: How do people live with each other after doing horrendous things to each other? How do societies put themselves together or continue to exist after terrible wars? What is day to day existence like when such violence exists within living memory? Though fiction can never come close to the reality of living with atrocity, it can help us ask important questions about our world and our treatment of each other.Since living in the woods makes it all too easy to imagine being one of the last people left in the world, After the Cure is only the first novel of several that will take place in a post-apocalyptic, "post-zombie" world.
