A TALE OF THE LAST DAYS
Nothing valued is here. Three men disagreed. One woman followed them.
A post-apocalyptic revenge western set inside a real “Landscape of Thorns”: the 15 metres concrete warning designed to keep us out of our own nuclear waste.
Tragic Irony
A haunting, beautifully paced story about the cost of vengeance and the tragic irony of human ignorance. Roy has created a world that feels vast, dangerous, and deeply realized in just a few short pages.
UNHEEDED WARNING
“Thorns” is a bleak, atmospheric post-apocalyptic story about revenge, radiation, and the dangerous things people believe when they no longer understand the world around them. Set among the enormous concrete warning structures of an abandoned nuclear waste repository, it turns a real-world problem of nuclear waste communication into a compelling piece of horror. The repository was designed to warn future generations away. Years after the Collapse, its warnings have become something else entirely: a promise of treasure.
Hannah enters the field with a crossbow, a radiation counter, and unfinished business. The three men she is hunting have their own interpretation of the ruins, and their greed leads them deeper into a landscape designed to keep people out. As the counter’s clicks become increasingly ominous, the story steadily shifts from revenge tale to something much more unsettling.
“Thorns” works especially well because the horror isn’t simply what happened to Hannah or what might be waiting beneath the ground. It is the realization that the old world left warnings behind, and the new world no longer knows how to read them. The concrete thorns remain standing. The warning remains valid. Only the people have changed.
Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.