"Happy Doomsday"

David Sosnowski has worked as a gag writer, fireworks salesman, telephone pollster, university writing instructor, and environmental-protection specialist while living in places as different as Washington, DC; Detroit, Michigan; and Fairbanks, Alaska. His books include the critically acclaimed novels Rapture and Vamped.

Sosnowski applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Happy Doomsday, and reported the following:

The following passage comes from around the middle of page 69 of Happy Doomsday:

And so Dev looked at the parking lot, where the zombies weren’t, but where a lot of unclaimed personal transportation was. He hadn’t bothered with driver’s ed – hadn’t seen the point. Though not being able to drive in Michigan rendered him pretty much an invalid, regardless of his position on the spectrum, Dev knew he’d never be able to drive. Moving through an ever-changing landscape at twenty-five miles or more per hour was just too much data for his brain to process. He knew this because it had been too much for him to handle just being a passenger, which had been his argument to Leo some time ago. If his parents and he ever had to go anywhere that involved getting on the freeway, his stepdad slipped him a Xanax, and then Dev would stretch out on the backseat, eyes closed, facedown. More than once, they’d been stopped while going through customs at the Ambassador Bridge that connected Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, the agents insisting that Dev get out and prove he wasn’t dead or a hostage. Maybe give him a chance to blink “help me” in Morse code or something.

This passage comes just after an event known as “the Whatever-It-Was” leaves Dev the only survivor in a high school where everyone else has mysteriously dropped dead. The passage isn’t necessarily representative because it leaves out two major characters: Lucy, a Goth girl from Georgia, and Marcus (a.k.a., Mo) from Oklahoma, both of whom also survive the original event and eventually hookup with Dev. The passage does give the reader a snapshot of Dev autistic world view and takes place at a pivotal point in the story, i.e., the doomsday of the title, which is hinted at by the reference to the school parking lot’s lacking zombies, though elsewhere in the novel there will be plenty of moldering corpses of the non-walking variety.

Visit David Sosnowski's website.

My Book, The Movie: Happy Doomsday.

--Marshal Zeringue