EWAN MORRISON on the terrifying research that sparked the inspiration for the pandemic thriller ‘How To Survive Everything’
AMERICAN BLACKOUT
My fear of the end of the world used to be pretty average. That was until 2013, when my wife, scriptwriter Emily Ballou and I were hired to write the script for a two hour ‘Movie event - a docu-drama for National Geographic Television called ‘American Blackout’. It had been commissioned to launch season two of their eccentric and successful TV series ‘Doomsday Preppers’. Our script was about a cataclysmic cyber- attack on the US Electrical grid and the ensuing civilisational collapse.
Advertised during the Super Bowl, American Blackout managed to clock-up an estimated 30 million viewers. It was debated in US congress and became part of the canon of apocalypse survival movies and a hotly debated subject of Prepper and Survivalist chatrooms. We were thrilled that the preppers thought we’d got our facts right about the step by the step-by-step processes of civilizational collapse. Thrilled, yes, but we’d also been quite traumatised by what our research had uncovered.
THE TERRIFYING RESEARCH
As part of our research, we had access to information from FEMA, the US Energy Dept, and professors of Collapse Studies at Columbia and Delaware universities; professors of National Security Strategy at the National War College, Washington, grid engineers, the SANS institute, experts on homeland security and cyber security, scientists at the RAND institute, the director of CSIS and the US cyber Consequences Unit. We were only able to use about 2% of all that we discovered about the house of cards that is modern society.
What the research showed was that western nations with their global ‘just in time’ supply chains of food and fuel, are highly precarious. The tipping point could be brought about by many crises – eco-disaster, economic collapse, severe shortages such as ‘Peak Oil’, civil war or by an unexpected pandemic.
My wife and I started to become like the characters in Blackout. Secretly, we started ‘prepping’ to survive a global catastrophe (just in case). This was just after the MERS epidemic and my wife and I bought a tiny hideaway in a remote part of Scotland. We seriously started drawing up plans to escape from civilisation, when the SHTF (Shit Hits The Fan), as the Preppers say.
At this point in 2013/14, How to Survive Everything wasn’t really a fiction. It was more like a secret obsession.
PANDEMIC SAFE HOUSE
I wasn’t really thinking about a novel at this point. I was more concerned about what my family would do if there was a civilisation threatening event.
Preppers need to be self-sustaining and to survive for potentially years with no contact with the outside world, so I started sketching what an ideal Safe House would be like. To my surprise I found that the old Scottish farm format with farmhouse, three barns and a quad in the middle was the most castle-like, defensible structure. The quad shape also meant that the interior survival technology would be unseen from outside.
Hidden inside would be fruit and vegetable poly-tunnels, solar panels, goats, a chicken run, weapons storage and water catchment and filtration systems. Below that would be two bunkers, one for cold food storage and the other as a panic room, in case of severe emergencies. Beyond that I decided we needed a fortified, razor wired and electrified outer wall and beyond that 3/4 of a mile away would be a perimeter fence, 3 metres high and topped with razor wire. Maybe I went a bit nuts on the design but I knew from the research that in a civilizational collapse, you have to protect yourself from starving gangs and at this point it was all just ‘on paper’.
I took inspiration for this from the high security at the Nuclear bases at HMNB Faslane and RNAD (Royal Navy Armarments Depot) Coulport in Scotland; these are two of the biggest military enclosures in Europe, and they are only ten miles away from where I live on Loch Long. In fact, in driving to my own rural get-away, I always pass a mile of razorwire, armed guards and infrared CCTV cameras at Faslane.
So, having designed this formidable prepper fortress, two things became really clear to me.
There was no way we could build anything like this paranoid fantasy enclosure in reality.
This set up would make for a brilliant thriller.
Which posed a big question:
PREPPER PARENTS & ABDUCTION
The question needs a little background - I was divorced back in 2004, and every weekend, and once a week on Wednesday, I took my teenage son and daughter for an overnight stay. That was our weekly set up. In thriller terms, a man like me, with five days a week in which his kids can’t see what he is up to, would be the perfect Apocalypse prepper. So, the character of Ed Cooper, the divorced ex-journalist with two kids emerged. Ed was like me but much more extreme. In my mind, Ed had seen classified Govt intelligence about virus research and he’d had a nervous breakdown because no-one would listen to the terrible truth. Not even his then-wife Justine, who would soon become his ex-wife due to what she saw as his paranoid delusions.
So, Ed had got a group of likeminded apocalypse preppers together to build the safe house I’d designed in the wilderness in the 5 days a week when he didn’t see his kids. Great, I often find that writing a character who is a more unhinged version of myself, adds a level of psychological realism. This all made sense to me as the set up for a story about a man driven to the edge who wants to save his kids.
This then raised an important question, if Ed sensed that a civilisation threatening event was about to happen, how on earth would he convince his ex-wife to let him take the kids away to his secret prepper safe house? She would, of course, think he was totally insane, and refuse to let him have the kids. Maybe she’d even have him arrested or sectioned.
I asked myself what I’d do in Ed’s shoes and the answer was pretty horrible.
I’d have to abduct my own kids. With force if necessary.
THE UNWILLING HEROINE
So, in story terms, father Ed Cooper abducts his two children and steals them away to the rural safe house - this all seemed good thriller material to me, but when I started to write it from Ed’s perspective it seemed to be like so many ‘crazed dad tries to save kids’ stories. And I thought, who would be most shaken by this situation? Whose perspective should I write the story from? Both daughter Haley (15) and mother Justine (42) would clearly be very upset; Haley’s little brother Ben (6) might imagine that this whole abduction thing was quite fun. Whose world would be turned upside down most? I decided Haley should be the protagonist.
Imagine being stuck in a tug of war between two divorced parents who have two entirely different views of what’s happening in the world, who have had a terrible divorce and don’t trust each other. Imagine always being the peacemaker, always being caught in the middle. I thought Haley’s Point of View, as a child of divorce would be the most awful position to be in. Haley has a terrible choice to make - is her dad right and a pandemic is ravaging the world? Or is her mother right and her dad is having psychotic breakdown and acting out a divorce-revenge?
Once I started writing from Haley’s perspective I realised that there was some very dark humour to be had with her predicament. I thought, ‘what is the worst thing in the world that could happen to Haley? Death of her brother? No, it was for her mother to be locked in the survivalist camp with her dad, and for the two to be screaming at each other 24/7. And perhaps Justine was right, and the pandemic was just in Ed’s head? How would Haley know?
So, I realised that Haley’s mother, Justine, needed to try to rescue her kids from the safe-house. The thriller, was developing into a dark satire of the modern dysfunctional family, with conflicted Haley at its heart – an everyday teenage girl who really doesn’t want to be in the middle of world ending pandemic at all, or stuck between two warring parents. I loved the dynamic as well, of a daughter who really loves her Dad, but fears he might be insane.
BETTER TO BE TEN YEARS TOO EARLY THAN ONE MINUTE TOO LATE.
How to Survive Everything is set in 2025. The Covid-19 pandemic has ended and life comes almost back to normal again. At least that’s what Justine and the kids think, butt Ed is attentive to Bill Gates warning that there would be another global pandemic in our generation. As Ed says: “Better to be Ten Years Too Early than One Minute too Late.”
According to Ed, the post covid-boomtime - the massive trillion dollar expansion in the Virus and Vaccines business - leads to aggressive international competition for ownership of pathogens. As I was researching this in May 2020, I was deeply alarmed to find that are already many cases of ‘pathogen theft’, with scientists stealing live and deadly viruses from one country and attempting to smuggle them to other countries. In 2019, Scientists in Winnipeg were caught illegally shipping Ebola virus to China, while a student was caught in Logan international airport attempting to “smuggle vials of ‘biological material’ out of US hidden in a sock”. An inventory at Fort Derrick Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), discovered as many as 9,200 dangerous pathogens and toxins, that were not logged into their database. Illegal experiments and secret trade in Pathogens is real.
In How to Survive Everything, it is the uncontainable growth of the vast new virus and vaccine trade that leads to the new pandemic. Ed’s belief is that short-sighted human greed and government cover-ups cause the creation of a super-virus that is then stolen and leaked by accident.
Being always obsessed with prediction and how narratives play out in history, I realised that Ed’s scenario was altogether too credible; we are living a time in which international bio-security problems are escalating and so writing the novel in 2020, became a matter of urgency for me.
I would hope that How To Save Everything is a thriller about the danger of things collapsing – civilisation, families and most of all, our belief in what used to be called truth. Who can Haley believe? And who do we believe these days?
Ewan Morrison’s new novel How to Survive Everything follows a teenage girl whose life is upended when her survivalist father abducts her and her little brother.
Morrison’s last novel Nina X, was the winner of the Saltire Prize Fiction Book of the Year 2019.
How to Survive Everything is published by Contraband, an imprint of Saraband on March 1st 2020
N.B All of the images in this article are copyright cleared and either come from me or from Copyright free sources.
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