"Beneath the Surface of Walk the Vanished Earth" by Brady Huggett
One night, in 2015, I was sitting in a bar with Erin Swan, who was about a year away from starting to write her debut novel, Walk the Vanished Earth. We’d met in an MFA workshop about a year before, and had reached that stage in friendships where you begin to reveal the more private aspects of your lives. She told me that her father died when she was young: he battled cancer for many months, and then one day something hemorrhaged and he collapsed in a downstairs bathroom. Her mother let Swan view the body before the ambulance came. Swan looked through the doorway, saw the blood that had leaked from her father’s mouth and nose, saw that it had turned the whites of his eyes red.
It was the formative moment of her childhood. “And that’s why,” she told me across the bar table, “all my stories have dead fathers in them.”
In that period of her writing career, they certainly did. As early as Swan’s first published short story, a dead father can be found. In Kings of Metal, 14-year-old Laura is jammed in the middle of the back seat in a car full of boys, heading to a Manowar concert in Newark, NJ. At that age, the future can feel gloriously wide open, but also precarious and terrifying, and as the car weaves through desolate, industrial Newark, Laura finds herself still mourning her dad’s passing. She recalls the “death rattle” in his throat, and how his “legs thinned down to sticks” as his cancer progressed. Until one Sunday, “he coughed up blood in his office at home and died.”
The concert excursion is ultimately a failure — the kids cannot find the venue — but as they struggle to make their way back out of New Jersey, the story considers what life will do to this collection of teenagers, and to Laura especially, a girl forever scarred by a family “broken early.”
Similar loss haunts the characters in Swan’s short story Artichoke Hearts, published in 2015. The story’s narrator is in Florida with her husband’s family, gathered around its dying patriarch, Frank. While helping to turn Frank in his sick bed, the narrator recalls her own father’s death:
A year and a half he lasted, thinning down just like Frank, his eyes sinking further back into his skull. Then one September morning, when I was concocting an acorn feast for my dolls outside and my mother was plunging the clogged kitchen sink, something burst in his brain, sending him tumbling to the bathroom floor. My mother found him first. She was still standing there when I banged open the screen door in search of doll cups.
“It’s happened,” she said to me. “Do you want to see him?” She had always believed in presenting me with choices.
I was only eight, so I looked, because I didn’t know any better. Blood had filled his skull, leaked from his ears, his mouth, his nose. His eyes had turned a bright and shocking red.
The element of a dead father can also be found in Then You Won’t be Sorry, and again in Swan’s story Possession. Indeed, for many years, her writing seemed powered by this early trauma. But not long after she wrote Possession, her work began to change.
Swan’s mother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in fall 2016 and soon underwent surgery to excise the tissue. In response, Swan wrote In the Big Woods, a story that explores a child’s anxiety around the loss of a mom. It was also an outlet for Swan to probe a future in which her mother might also depart. Indeed, her mother’s cancer did return, and she passed in 2020. And during this time, Swan was writing what would become Walk the Vanished Earth.
The book has been categorized as climate fiction, dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, or even fantasy. It begins in 1873 Kansas with a buffalo hunter named Samson indifferently slicing a calf’s throat; within a few pages the reader is transported to Mars in 2073 and introduced to a lonely girl just entering puberty named Moon.
The rest of the novel unfolds between these two points. First there is Bea in Kansas City in 1975. Bea is mute and pregnant and deluded, sure she will give birth to a giant. Her son Paul (certainly not a giant) follows his recurring vision and builds a “floating city” above a flooded New Orleans. He resides there with his daughter, Kaiser, and serves as leader of the artistic commune he helped form. When the community eventually dissolves in 2027, Kaiser has visions of her own, and sets her sights on Mars.
And on it goes, the book showing us pockets of humanity straining to adapt in a violent and changing world. There are floods, wind storms, cannibalistic “Marauders” and a collapse of government. The book is a rollicking, wild ride, with vivid scenes and well-tended characters.
But it is still an Erin Swan story. Mainly written in those four years between her mother’s cancer diagnosis and eventual passing, Swan had begun to consider a world where both her father and mother were gone. This new anxiety powers the Walk the Vanished Earth. Throughout the book, children are without their parents. Bea has lost her mother and father. Paul grows up an orphan. Kaiser is without her mother. This continues through the generations, until we get to Moon in 2073. Moon is the most alone character of all; on barren Mars, she has two uncles, but no parents. She is so far removed from a nuclear family that when she stumbles onto an old mobile phone with a voice emanating from it, she uses the opportunity to ask about mothers — a concept completely foreign to her.
I leaned closer, breath quickening. “What does one tell a mother?”
“Not a lot when they’re alive.” The voice lowered. “I wish I’d told her everything.”
“What did you want to tell her?” “I wanted to say I liked the wrinkles around her eyes. And how fifty-whatever is too young to die. How she could pester me to comb my hair. She could demand I eat my dandelion greens and I wouldn’t care.”
Walk the Vanished Earth presents a long line of families “broken early.” Reviewers and readers have focused on the environmental trauma in the book, on the destructive weather patterns, the floods, the rising seas, and the visceral scenes on Mars. What struck me most was the book’s horrific scenes tied to childbirth — the incredible pain, the tearing of tissue, and the torrents of blood. I was also struck by how Swan completely untethered herself from the strict realism she pursued earlier in her writing life, and how the novel, over the course of reading it, stretches time until it becomes a sort of literary taffy.
But for all the surreal fireworks, at its heart Walk the Vanished Earth remains a family drama. Or rather, it is a drama about what happens to families, how they come apart, how parents are pulled into the ranks of the dead and the children are left behind to deal with the pain. Swan knows this pain. If you look beyond Walk the Vanished Earth’s plains of Kansas, its floating city above flooded New Orleans, and its voyage to Mars, you’ll find Erin Swan still working through her losses, considering the death of her parents, holding them up to the light and pondering her own path forward.
Brady Huggett's fiction and essays have been placed at Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, The King's English, December, and Cagibi. He won the Macaron Prize in fiction for 2020, and the 2021 Curt Johnson prose award for nonfiction
