From the mind behind the film-optioned debut The Puller comes Michael Hodges’ most ambitious collection yet. THE GLOAMING honors the gritty traditions of post-apocalyptic survival and First Contact suspense through 16 epic tales.
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Featured Stories from the Edge

Fletcher’s Mountains: In a world drained of oil and scorched by World War III, a lone survivor treks across a fractured America toward the sanctuary of a friend’s Montana cabin. But in the silence of the wilderness, he realizes he isn’t just traveling—he’s being hunted.

Lost Planes, Lost River: When a fleet of Wildlife Service Cessnas falls from the sky during a controversial wolf-culling mission, the FBI is deployed to the crash sites. What they find suggests that the wolves aren’t the only predators in the woods—and the “accidents” are anything but.

Hydra: A visionary scientist unlocks the secret to near-immortality, offering humanity a way to cheat the grave for decades. But the breakthrough carries a grim price: a biological imbalance that ensures humans will be the only living things left on Earth.

Gudmund’s Wolf: Sixty years ago, a wolf howled for Gudmund’s birthday. Today, the wolves are a myth, and Gudmund’s memories are following them into extinction. In this haunting tale of brotherhood and biological betrayal, two men wander into the deep uplands of the Michigan wilderness. One is searching for a way out; the other is searching for a way to say goodbye.

The best stories in ‘The Gloaming’ immersed me in a moment in time and used that moment to get me to reflect on the things we do now that make such dismal futures or unhappy presents possible. The longer stories pulled me into a narrative and engaged me in the fate of the protagonists as they faced unpleasant realities. The shorter ones slid into my imagination like splinters, lodging themselves there and making me pay them more attention than something of their length should have. 

The stories deal with people dealing with discontinuous changes in their lives that they may or may not be able to adapt to. The discontinuities range from apocalyptic wars, alien first contact, irreversible climate change through to facing the imminence of one’s own mental decline. Many of the stories take place in the shadow of loss, but some are about discovery and hope. The common thread seemed to me to be that the protagonists’ reactions to the discontinuity reveal who they are.

This quote from the first story, ‘Fletcher’s Mountains’, which describes a man’s return to the mountains of Montana in the aftermath of a global war, illustrates the point. Fletcher is reflecting on his countrymen’s reaction to sky-high gas prices resulting from World War III: 

“People went insane. Fletcher knew they always had it in them. You could see it in the highways at night, the meanness. When someone was driving with one headlight and their brights on to cover up for it, they’d get flashed back by oncoming drivers. That ain’t a kind country. More like an I got mine country. There were other things, too. Lost pets with ID tags scratching at neighbor’s doors, the neighbors refusing to answer. This was the kind of meanness. Not something people paid attention to every day. But he saw it, just under the skin like a virus, waiting for weakness. And boy did they show weakness. When people could no longer afford to buy gas, they began to kill each other, taking each other’s stuff.”

I’m glad I read ‘The Gloaming’. Some of those stories will stick with me, and I’ll be looking for more of Michael Hodges work. I think it would have been a much stronger collection if it had had fewer stories in it. Some of the stories felt like downloads from the author’s Work In Progress file rather than completed works.