A Metaphor with Heartland

Many of my stories have a murder mystery woven into them. With Welcome to Heartland, I wanted to take a different approach. There is a mystery element, but it connects strongly to several contemporary anxieties, even though its horror is speculative.

Heartland combines reproductive dystopia with smart-home surveillance, post-collapse isolation, and the claustrophobic unease of a manufactured community. Every home is welcoming, has cheerful automation and a reassuring language that conceals a system that reduces people to useful bodies.

That makes Heartland feel less like an impossible future and more like an intensified version of the pressures already visible today. But don’t worry, Heartland is only a metaphor. Today’s world doesn’t show a contrast between domestic softness and industrial violence. Does it?

What makes world-building in creative writing so appealing to me is that you can pull from real, tangible things and twist them into a future that can feel all too real. Is there talk of reproductive commodification; population decline and social engineering; privatized care and institutional neglect; climate and infrastructure collapse; and resistance and moral responsibility in the world today?

Ask yourself what the future will look like. Just don’t let your imagination run wild as it has in drafting Welcome to Heartland.