https://gazette.com/woodmenedition/pandemic-fiction-book-by-colorado-springs-author-seems-prescient/article_86cd4e0a-b4c6-11ea-b693-e3a1c4dedd56.html

Long before COVID-19 reared its prickle ball-shaped head, it was the Zika virus that scared Kelly McWilliams.

Pregnant with her daughter and living in Hawaii, McWilliams felt fear burrow its roots inside her as the epidemic made headlines around the world in 2015 and 2016. But along with that came the kernel of an idea. She paired that nugget with memories from her childhood growing up in Arizona, where she watched local news reports about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a sect better known as FLDS, that split from the Mormon church.

The Colorado Springs author’s timely new young adult book, “Agnes at the End of the World,” is the result. The mashup of cult escape novel and pandemic novel made its way onto People magazine’s recent “20 Best Books to Read This Summer.”

“I got a glimpse of how quickly your world can change due to a public health issue,” McWilliams says. “I had no idea the extent of what we’d be seeing now, but I do feel like I got a glimpse of it then. No way it was not going to wind up in the book.”

A recurring dream during McWilliams’ pregnancy gave her Agnes, the book’s teenage protagonist. In her dream, a girl was caring for a child while wandering the desert. McWilliams wanted to know what she was running away from and running toward, and believes it was her way of dealing with becoming a caregiver.

Agnes lives in Red Creek, which is, unbeknownst to her, headquarters of a fundamentalist cult lorded over by the Prophet, a character based on the real-life Warren Jeffs, leader of FLDS. Even though medicine is outlawed in the cult, every month Agnes barters with someone on the Outside for the insulin her younger brother needs to stay alive. She eventually meets Danny, an Outsider boy, and begins to question what she’s been told about life. As the Prophet grows more maniacal, she knows she must escape with her brother to the Outside, where a viral pandemic has been killing off the population.