From Abigail Jones’ extensive article for Newsweek:
While most kids were playing on swing sets or watching The Flintstones, Lori Nix spent her childhood traipsing through the woods looking for lawn chairs in trees and clothes hanging from branches. She grew up in 1970s Norton, Kansas, a small, rural town in the belly of Tornado Alley. Every winter brought snow and hailstorms. Summers meant infestations of grasshoppers, caterpillars and June bugs. Tornadoes were almost constant, as was the deluge of debris, cars and homes Mother Nature flung across the wide-open plains like cigarette butts.
The first word that comes to mind when I look at Nix’s rural and urban landscapes is ‘postapocalyptic.’ “I would actually say ‘post-mankind,’” Nix corrects me. “But other people have assigned ‘apocalyptic’ to it, so it always enters the conversation.”