I wonder if Devlin was perhaps also speaking about addiction and how it blurs the lines of reality to help one to cope with living. His first collection, ‘You Will Grow Into Them’ was published by Unsung Stories in 2017 and shortlisted for the British Fantasy and Saboteur Awards. Stories have a way of shaping our worldview, of allowing us to see things differently or from another perspective. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

It is a story--like all stories--with the ability to make us see the world just a little bit differently. The infected may not be who you think, depending on if you are one or not - because this is the zombie apocalypse with a twist, where the real infection has taken hold of those who think themselves survivors. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground.Devlin twists and breaks the typical zombie narrative without spoiling one of the cleverest conceits in recent horror.

Malcolm Devlin's stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, The Shadow Booth and Shadows and Tall Trees. Over months scavenging for food and supplies while defending himself and other survivors from the ravenous “Others,” Spence gradually awakens to the truth: He and his compatriots are afflicted with an illness that makes them see the uninfected as monsters when in reality they are just innocent people living their lives. And while diving headfirst into the hyper individualistic attitudes that dominate the genre, he questions their utility.Escape Rating B+: I’ll admit that I wanted an unequivocal ending to this, where the point-of-view character does finally wake up, take the red pill or the blue pill, and learn what is real. And the measurement of those 60 seconds can still take the same amount of objective time while still seeming to be of different duration on the opposite sides of that door. The point being that the world has ended and having a boring life is one of the survivor's biggest fantasy.