In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.

Interview with Robin Wasserman about “In the Valley of the Shadow of the Promised Land”

(Interview by Lee Hallison)

Abraham sacrifices Isaac in the bible – did you research biblical history before starting this triptych of stories?

No, I didn’t need to do much research–I went to Hebrew school all through my childhood, so these Bible stories are pretty much embedded in my subconscious. I actually didn’t set out to echo the Abraham/Isaac story in the first story–I only knew that I wanted to create something that would, eventually, form a religious origin story that would somehow be retold in the final story. (That story was originally titled “Midrash,” which is the Hebrew word for a collection of stories that, over the centuries, were extrapolated/intepreted from the text of the Old Testament. From the start, I imagined stories #1 and #2 as a kind of Midrash for the civilization of story #3.) It was only once I had the initial concept in place, and was honing in on the father-son relationship at the heart of it, that I realized I was working with a story that had already been told. Read More »