Catherine Wells

About “Artie’s Angels”

Catherine Wells’ story for Wastelands, “Artie’s Angels,” is about a boy named Artie, one of those winning guys whom everyone loves. “He’s street-savvy and a bit of a rogue, but his values are sound: He wants to take care of the people around him, people who don’t have anyone else to look out for them; and being a little guy, he has to fight with ideas instead of muscle,” Wells said. “He’s a natural leader who isn’t interested in power, he just wants people around him to be better off.”

The story started out as the idea for a novel, but there wasn’t enough there to carry it to that length, Wells said. “The challenge became to build the world and the characters in a short space, and to condense a good deal of action without making it seem like an outline. The arc is the story, and I had to flesh it out enough to engage the reader without slowing down the pace.”

Wells has only known tragedy as a witness, but every now and then she feels the need to crawl inside someone else and try to imagine how devastating loss feels, she said. “The personal part this story for me was crawling inside Morgan, feeling those emotions I knew only as a dream that haunted me.”

The Appeal of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Post-apocalyptic fiction is a way to deal with our nightmares, Wells said. “The comfort, security, and stability we enjoy–what if it was all ripped away? And while we may be unwilling to confront that possibility in our everyday lives, still it nags at us, and we keep wondering, what if…?”

Favorite Examples of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

The story that stays with Wells is Stephen King’s The Stand.  “What caught me up ere the very real characters with very real flaws who had to contend with all those messy things  sometimes glossed over in post-apocalyptic literature: clearing the highways, getting the power back on, burying the bodies,” she said. “The banding together of disparate people, first to survive, then to resist chaotic evil, shows that everyone can contribute, and even the weak are capable of nobility.  It is an uplifting story, one that helps us realize we need each other, even when we don’t like each other.”