In Adam J. Nicolai's newest book, Todd, he continues his trend of using a story focused around a parent and child dynamic. This time a father and son are left alone when it appears everyone else on the planet has vanished. However, if you think this is your typical apocalyptic or sci-fi novel, think again.
Like Nicolai's previous one-off stories, Todd also focuses on an overreaching theme that the parent must face. While Alex dealt with grief and Rebecca postpartem, Todd handles depression.
Alan, the father of the story, must fight through his inner demons that have plagued him since childhood in the worst of times. Nicolai does a wonderful job of showing the mindset of someone afflicted with depression and shows how difficult it can be to want to move forward. What do you do if there is no point in doing so? That even if you do get up just to help your son survive, the nagging thoughts of "he's just going to die anyway" will not cease. Nicolai really nails down the idea that there is no stopping the inevitable.
This story could have been another run of the mill apocalyptic tale, and it actually had some unique perspectives on what that would be like. However, Nicolai went against that and instead used a desolated Earth with blue etheral beings – that he explained to me were in a way a bacteria – turning everything into blue moss merely for setting and some drama.
The depression plaguing Alan is the real story. It is hard enough existing in the world as it is for someone suffering through depression. Imagine there being nothing left. Do you just give up or do you find what's left and cherish it for what it is?
Those who read Nicolai's books may have come to the similar initial question that I had: why do they all focus around children? “Children are incidental,” stated Nicolai. “What I like to write about is horrible stuff.”
This horrible stuff he talks about is more or less his own fears and personal issues that he has dealt with and had to overcome in the past. The children of his stories are manifestations of his own fears that have arisen as a result of being a parent. “When my youngest son was born, I went through a horrible fear of losing him,” he told me. This was some of the inspiration for his first novel Alex, and probably a fear many other parents can understand.
Fears that accompany parenthood, however, are just a small part of a much larger story that has been taking place in Nicolai's writing. Even though each of his one-off novels seem to have no tie-ins, they all actually have an interwoven theme taking place that readers may not see (I didn't).
When Nicolai first started writing Alex, it was when he had first “lost faith in Christianity.” The story may be that of a father grieving the loss of his child, but Nicolai was grieving the loss of his religion through his writing. This continued into his story of Rebecca about a young woman so dead set against admitting she was a lesbian that she slept with a man and became pregnant through which he said he was expressing his angry atheist phase. Finally with Todd there is the embodiment of when Nicolai had “lost all meaning in the universe.”
Like Alan in the story, Nicolai was lost in a pit of darkness and really wondered “what was the point” of continuing. The way back from that depression was through finding acceptance. Like his character he had to come to the realization that “there is no escaping the end, and that's ok.”
Each of Nicolai's stories, although grim, really hone in on serious issues that many people could relate to even if they are not dealing with a loss of faith in their own lives. He creates beautiful stories about broken people simply trying to find a way to make it to the next day or find a way to be better than their past self. When you read one of his books, you are caught inside the mind of what it must be like to go through such a profound emotion, and even if you have personally not gone through such an emotion, you probably know someone who has. In the end, I think his stories can teach us all empathy for the pain of others.
If you want to read any of Adam Nicolai's books, he can be found on Amazon. In addition to Alex, Rebecca, and Todd, he is also the author of a fantasy novel – Children of a Broken Sky – which should be followed up with a sequel soon.