As this is an author’s analysis, THERE WILL BE ***SPOILERS*** OF THE STORY, OF COURSE, so if you are reading this BEFORE you read the actual short story, I have two things to say:
1. Please don't and
2. This is a post to strictly discuss characters, the ending, and my crazy mind that created this story, like a director's cut with commentary, if you will, so all will be revealed and you will know everything about it before you even had the chance to read the story.
You can find the full story down below this post or on the "And We Are Not Saved" page.
So, with that being said, let’s get started on this tragic apocalyptic story!!
>> SIDE NOTE <<
First of all, despite the above photo with the woman in modern clothes and a modern-ish car (the pictures I use obviously can't always be exact, folks), I imagined this story taking place in the early 50s (you know, the diner and all that) in a rural town in the South. It doesn't truly matter what year it is or where it takes place, considering I don't blatantly state these things, but to get inside my head, if you will, that is what I imagined as far as the broad time and setting. Alright, with that little tidbit being said, let's begin!
“And We Are Not Saved” is my second favorite story that I have ever written, right below “American Appetites”. It was published in The Iris Review, vol. II last year and received a bunch of positive reactions from people that read it and also from my college creative writing professor (let it be known that he didn’t award compliments unless you had dang good writing) who reached out to me after I had graduated just to tell me his opinions and to push me to submit my works for consideration to bigger markets, so I felt pretty ecstatic after it was published! Because of his push, I submitted my deer cryptid story to The Sirens Call and it was picked up! So, thank you, Dr. Pelton for believing in my writing!
This story started out under the title: “The Altered Actualities of Greeley County”... yeah, not the best. I actually wrote it while I was in college and brought it in for my creative writing workshop class to read and to give me feedback, however, the story I submitted then was far far far different from the story you read on this website. While the main idea stayed the same (i.e. creatures that are either alien, demonic, or something from another dimension coming to “harvest” humans while our narrator lingers on waiting for the day that she will inevitably be taken and talks to us about it), the characters, plot, and diner were not a part of the original manuscript. The only characters that stayed the same were Buck the dog and the narrator, but she wasn’t such a jerk in the first version.
That’s it.
The first version was basically like a “survival guide” in a sense to the reader when visiting Greeley County during the "harvesting" time. It wasn’t bad, mind you, but it just didn’t feel like a story. It didn’t feel right to me even as the writer. There was so much world-building for my apocalyptic setting that it kind of got out of hand for a short story-length piece. I was told that it would have made a great sci-fi novel if I was to flesh it out and add more plot, but, of course, I’m not writing it as a novel. I already have a novel in the works that I have been sweating and dripping blood over since high school that is nowhere near ready to be sent to an agent to hopefully one day be published, so the novel about Greeley County will have to wait a few decades.
I shelved the story for a good half year. I didn’t touch it. I moved on to other works and things while it collected dust and faded from memory, but after I graduated in 2018, I finally picked it back up.
I had a friend from college that was on the editing team for The Iris Review who asked for me to send in a piece for consideration, so, having no new sparks for inspiration chomping at the bit to be written, I looked back at the one story that I felt could never be fixed or could never be turned into something great.
Well, as it so happens, it did just that.
I opened up a fresh document on Microsoft Word, keeping the knowledge of what the first version held tightly in my brain, but never adding or taking from it. I wrote on a blank page. Soon, out came what you read on my website. I added characters, left the creatures ambiguous, and turned the story onto a religious satirical tone.
NOTE TO WRITERS AND MORAL OF THE STORY: if a piece is there halfway, and you feel it in your bones that it can be amazing but right now it’s just “eh”... scrap it and start from scratch!! I know it is so hard to hear that and the thought of scrapping your work is abysmal to think about --- I thought the same thing when I heard this for the first time --- BUT I am living proof that scrapping and starting over works, and in its wake, you get something 50x better than what you started with!
Horror and religion are like peanut butter and jelly, if you ask me. The two contradict each other completely as far as what the two represent, but they create something perfect when mashed together. They offer great characterization, plot, and creatures when joined in fiction, which is why you have so many horror movies and stories that involve Catholic practices and symbols of Christianity... to fend off the horror, we humans turn to religion. It’s what humans have always done in the face of the unknown and to combat folklore myths for centuries.
In apocalyptic fiction, religion is a great tool. During the end times of humanity and the world, humans either turn to answers in religion, criticize God for allowing things to happen, or completely object religion and rely only on themselves. Using religion with horror is also a staple of the Southern Gothic subgenre (think Flannery O’ Connor and William Faulkner). My story takes place in the South, and I wanted it to be able to fall into the Southern Gothic category.
So, in the story, we have the pessimistic criticizer of religion who thinks that she is better than the town she was raised in (the narrator, Lilly), the religious reverend who is a contradiction of himself as a drunkard, the convict who has murdered in the past but is now seeking redemption for his soul with God, and the absent-minded teenager who goes back and forth between reciting spells to being completely wracked with fear and spewing out random things to herself. Quite a colorful bunch who would never in their wildest dreams be around each other in normal, everyday life.
I love this cast of characters that I created! I felt that each one symbolized how each type of person might be in an apocalyptic situation, or at least they showed different angles to how humans react and interact under fear and pressure. This is a horror piece, of course, at its roots, but it became more of a psychological character study, sort of like how The Walking Dead is: you have a zombie story, but the meat of it is not the zombies; it’s how the people interact, how they handle the fear of dying, and what they will due to survive.
The Bible verses in this story were absolutely perfect for this piece. I was racking my brain for what to use, because I knew that I wanted the reverend to be shouting these words to the others like he was giving the last bit of religious hope to them before their inevitable deaths, kind of like in the movie Titanic when the reverend starts reading scripture to the frantic people on board in an attempt to save their souls and bring them comfort before they die. I went to church every Sunday as a child and grew up in church all my life. I’m still a Christian to this day (yes, I write horror. I know the thoughts about that, but I do not do it in the fashion that is to thumb my nose at my religion. I know what I believe, and I never write pieces that applaud or uphold evil and darkness as something desirable or as something to put energies into. To me, horror is taking a look at the darker sides of the world while understanding that it is no reflection of me and what I believe. It’s fiction.). So, with that being said, I know some Bible passages, and the one about the harvest was too good not to use.
This story comments on the whole idea of salvation and what it means to us. It shows how human we all are. We have a reverend who still sins, a convict whose sin can be redeemed if he believes and accepts it, a pessimist who never agrees to salvation, and the girl who knows nothing of it and refuses to hear anything other than what strictly revolves around her.
You don’t have to read this as a commentary on salvation. If that’s not your thing, then shoot yeah, it’s a horror piece in any way that you want it! But, I like this added layer of meaning behind my story, so I hope you will too. I just happened to use these themes and ideas in the fashion of horror.
While the narrator, Lilly, says that they are all damned, only the ones that turned from God at the end were damned. So, it would seem that the convict, the one who had the most blatant sin marked on him was saved in the end as he asks God to forgive him for all he has done and what he is about to do (I thought it was a cool switch to have the clean-record Lilly have the sin of the murder of the reverend on her hands after she had just ripped Darin apart for the exact same sin he committed years prior). The reverend might have been too, but we don’t know for sure, because we are getting the narrative from Lilly, who sees no salvation to be given to anyone. She believes the world is over, that we’re all dying, that there is nothing we can do, and that no one can save us in any way shape or form, be that our bodies orour souls. So, yeah, since we’re listening to Lilly, we do get the pessimistic, horror-inducing last thought of “That’s it, the end. The black veil has covered the world without it lifting and no one is left. We only have the animals running around freely.”
I didn’t want the animals to have to be harvested. I have a soft spot for animals and just couldn’t do that to them, even in fiction. But, you know, to the humans, sure!
I like the thought that Lilly has in the story about how animals are too pure for horror and destruction to feed off of them, which is kind of how it seems to be in the story. These creatures don’t harvest the animals. Why? Maybe it’s for that very reason, but I wanted the creatures’ “morals” or plans of action for why they were doing this to humans to be ambiguous the entire time, because, like I said before, the story is not about the monster/alien creatures... it’s about humanity. So, anyway, back to the animals.
I wanted Buck to be this lasting bit of life and hope for Lilly. She is alone, essentially, and only has love and patience in her heart for her dog. She knows that she will eventually never return to him one day, because she will be harvested by these creatures, and that Buck will be alone in the world, never having known what happened or what will happen. It’s a terrible version of an unknown last goodbye.
The entire world behind this story has been established without having to get into the meat of it, which I thought was great considering how the first version of the story was all about world-building to an annoyingly long level. I don’t think the reader needs an answer to everything as the characters themselves do not even have an answer.
At the end of “And We Are Not Saved,” everyone is either dead or alone until their final hour. There is nothing good or happy in its wake. Things will come to eat you and there is not a single thing you can do about it as the world slowly empties of life. If you’re an animal, your owner leaves one day without a reason and you are stuck alone in the world while these monsters roam free until you die.
It’s all a bit tragic really, isn’t it? But if you came here to read horror, you surely didn’t come for sunshine and rainbows.
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