Tom Epperson: Baby Hawk

Tom Epperson, a native of Arkansas, headed west to Los Angeles with his boyhood friend Billy Bob Thornton to pursue a career in show business.  Epperson’s co-written the scripts for One False Move, A Family Thing, The Gift, A Gun, a Car, a Blonde, and Jayne Mansfield’s Car.  His L.A. noir The Kind One was nominated for both the Edgar Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel.  Three more books followed, Sailor, Roberto to the Dark Tower Came, and Make Believe.  His most recent book is Baby Hawk, a novel in verse.  He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Stefani, two pampered cats, and two frisky dogs.

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Called simply “the female,” she is seventeen, one of the few survivors of a worldwide plague known simply as the Sickness—and quite possibly the last woman on Earth.

She lives in the mountains and forests of northern California, protected by her father.  Life is hard, but they’re happy.

Until one chilly autumn morning when a violent, racist band of males, led by an elite ex-soldier called Braydon, finds them.  Overjoyed at discovering a female they can “enjoy,” the men kill the female’s father and take her prisoner.  Life becomes intolerable for the female.  Delighted to be in possession of the last woman on Earth—or so they believe— they keep her isolated in a cabin of her own, for them to take turns with.  Braydon sets up a strict rotation to avoid any unrest within the camp—but his own intention is to make her the new Eve, to breed with her and repopulate the Earth.

Throughout the winter, the female trains—making herself as strong and fit as she can for the spring.  She is determined to escape, or die trying.

Transcript

Sarah Harrison: 0:24

Welcome to Tea Tonic and Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers

Carolyn Daughters: 0:38

cup of tea, a gin and tonic, but not a toxin, and join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

Sarah Harrison: 0:57

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Carolyn Daughters: 1:44

I'm so excited. I was giddy reading Baby Hawk because it feels different. It's a novel in verse.

Sarah Harrison: 1:56

It is different. It caught our attention for sure. Without too much further ado, let's jump into the summary. Then I'm going to tell you a little bit about Tom Epperson, our guest today.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:09

Wonderful. The book is called Baby Hawk, and it's a novel in verse. It was just published in August 2025. The protagonist is called simply the female. She's 17, one of the few survivors of a worldwide plague known simply as the sickness and quite possibly the last woman on earth. She lives in the mountains and forests of northern California, protected by her father. Life is hard, but they're happy until one chilly autumn morning when a violent, racist band of males led by an ex-elite soldier called Braden, find them. They are overjoyed at discovering a female they can enjoy. The men kill the female's father and take her prisoner. Life becomes intolerable for the female. They are delighted to be in possession of the last woman on earth, or so they believe. They keep her isolated in a cabin of her own for them to take turns with. Braden sets up a strict routine to avoid any unrest within the camp, but his own intention is to make her the new Eve, to breed with her and repopulate the earth. Throughout the winter, the female begins to train, making herself as strong and fit as she can. For the spring, she's determined to escape or die trying.

Sarah Harrison: 3:22

Tom Epperson is joining us today. A native of Arkansas, he headed west to Los Angeles with his boyhood friend Billy Bob Thornton to pursue a career in show business. Since then, he co-wrote the scripts for one false move, A Family Thing; The Gift; A Gun, a Car, a Blonde; and Jane Manfield's Car. His L.A. noir, The Kind, one was nominated for both the Edgar Award and the Barry Award for Best first novel. Three more

books followed: 3:54

Sailor, Roberto to the Dark Tower Came, and Make Believe. Tom Epperson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Stephani, two pampered cats, and two frisky dogs. Welcome!

Tom Epperson: 4:10

Good to be here.

Carolyn Daughters: 4:14

They are frisky dogs.

Tom Epperson: 4:24

All right, go away[dogs]. Come on. All right, I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm used to chaos.

Sarah Harrison: 4:32

Tom's gonna do a little bit of reading for us from Baby Hawk. This is Chapter One, correct? All right, let's jump in there.

Tom Epperson: 4:42

Okay, all right, be quiet [dogs]. There was only one left. She was barely 17. They shared her with each other. Her and treated her as carefully as they could under the circumstances, because she was so rare and precious, more golden than gold, more sparkling than a diamond, the last female left on the earth, as far as they knew. Anyway, they called her Martha, because she wouldn't tell them her real name. There were 16 of them. They did not want their group to devolve into chaos, so they had to make rules pertaining to Martha. The rules were strict and enforced without mercy. Only one male each day for one hour, with every seventh day allotted to her to do with as she wished she was never to be hurt physically, and one male, who became intoxicated and black in her eye with his fist, was summarily Marsh into the trees and shot. And then 15 was their number. A schedule was worked out and rigidly adhered to. The male, for any reason whatever, missed his day with her. No make up day was allowed. He would simply have to wait till his day came around again, and every male had to ensure that she did not become enceinte. That was the word they used. Enceinte. The female didn't know what they were talking about till Braden, the leader of the males, told her it meant pregnant. The males thought highly of themselves and believed they were treating her of the great kindness and solicitude because they raped her only once a day. They knew that some day they would have to breed her to produce more females and propagate the species. But they've been without females for so long, they weren't yet ready to give up. The perfect thing she was to have her flat belly swell, to see her suckling some squalling infant, when at last, it was their day. Again. Life had gotten much better for them since that autumn morning when they'd seen the smoke drifting above the trees and discovered the female and her father sitting by fire warming themselves against the code, eating, talking, laughing, oblivious to the watchers and the trees, the Father, if foghorns protect his daughter left behind in the woods to be eaten by the animals.

Carolyn Daughters: 7:20

Thank you for reading from Chapter One of Baby Hawk. I think it's always great to hear an opening chapter in the author's voice. Let's start by talking about this amazing story. It's futuristic, it's dark. It's focused on a woman named Martha with a secret name. She keeps her name to herself. She's often referred to as "the female." Can you talk about the origin of this story. Where or how did this story come to you?

Tom Epperson: 8:09

Well, it came to me in a very interesting way. It was about three years ago. I was still living with my wife in Culver City, California, and I was working on a novel. One morning, about mid-morning, I took a little break, took my cup of coffee to the front window, and looked out at the street. I couldn't really see a lot, because there a lot of foliage on the three, but then across the street I saw a young woman running. She wasn't running from anyone. She was just a jogger. But it just flashed into my head, what if she were the last female on Earth and was being pursued by a pack of males? I thought, well, that's an interesting idea. So I stood there for about five minutes, and really the whole story of Baby Hawk came to me. I saw her female, 17 years old, living with her father in the northern part of California, in the forest and mountains, they discovered they were pretty happy, but they were discovered by a pack of males who killed her father, took her hostage, or took her really as their sex slave. They carried her to their encampment. And her life was hellish, but she was a feisty girl, strong, and she was determined to escape. And I thought, Wow, that's pretty good story. I mean, maybe I should write it down. Normally I would write a screenplay or a novel, but with Baby Hawk I tried something different. When I was just starting out as a writer, 18 years old and into my 20s, I wanted to be the next Scott Fisher or Nabokov. I wrote a couple of bad novels and dozens of short stories, some of which were not bad, and I wrote hundreds of poems. I just love poetry, and I think I was pretty good at it, but when I turned 30, I was really getting nowhere. With my writing, it's rarely piecing things together, and I thought maybe I should just go to Hollywood and try to become a screenwriter, because I love movies. And I had a best friend, Billy Bob Thornton. He was in a similar situation. He was in a rock band. There was a good rock band in a small town in Arkansas, but they played all over the state, and they were good. Billy was the drummer and he was also the singer, but he was getting really getting nowhere with this band. And he only went to college for a year and dropped out, and ever since then, he'd been doing blue collar kind of jobs. This was in 1981. He was working for the highway department in Arkansas. And so I decided to tell Billy Bob Thornton I was going to pursue a career in Hollywood, and I wanted him to come with me. Billy wasn't really a writer, but Billy was a great storyteller, and he was always having bizarre adventures. I'm kind of introvert. Billy is an extrovert. So Billy was always out there telling me these stories, there's always something weird and weird people. And he was a great storyteller, and he was a great mimic, and he would do voices of the people he was talking about. I said, "you and I could write scripts together." I said, you could be an actor, because Billy Bob Thornton was a little interested in acting. He'd acted in his senior play in high school. But that was really it. It really was all music for him at the time. And I said, I think you could be and I mean it sincerely. It wasn't a con job exactly. I said, I think you could be a really wonderful actor. I said, You remind me of John Travolta. John Travolta was a big thing back then. So actually, I talked Billy Bob Thornton into it because I didn't want to do it by myself. We didn't know anyone in L.A. We had no money. I just couldn't do it by myself. I think I probably wouldn't have gone if it was just me. So I went with my buddy. I was 30, and Billy was 25. He turned 26 shortly afterwards. We decided to give it a go. One rainy morning in June, June 7, we got in my car. I made $500 and we drove out of town, stopped at a gas station, and got a roadmap. And it's like, Okay, we just head west on Interstate 30. To make a long story short, it was a terrible time. We ran out of money, I don't know. Somehow we managed to stay out there. Spent years trying to break in, four years to get an agent, six years before we sold a script. But we were finally successful, and I always had it in my head, and I gave up poetry for many years. It was all screenplays for me. I gave up literature. It was screenplays. But I never really forgot the literary part of me. I always wanted to go back to it. I started writing novels 15 years ago or so, and I wanted to get back to poetry [which I do in Baby Hawk]. And it was always in my head when I turned 70. For some reason, I feel like writing poems. When I turned 70, I wrote a couple of poems and I thought they were good, and I enjoyed it. And so my first thought was. I'm going to write a poem with this new idea, which the working title for it was The Last Female on Earth. Not a really good title, but it didn't last for long. So the next morning, I got up and I put my novel aside, and I started writing my poem. I thought it'd be maybe 10 or 12 pages long, and two or three days I'd written 12 pages, and I was just getting started. So I thought, Well, okay, this will be a little bit longer. I kept writing and writing and writing and first in Culver City, and then in the middle of that period we moved to Santa Fe. So I worked for six months on it, and it turned into 150-page poem, which is like, wow, who's gonna want 150-page poem, you know? But I liked it a lot. I loved it, and I loved writing it, so I sent it to my agent and hoped he didn't think I was crazy. But he loved it. And turns out he was a poet too, and he actually had books of poetry published. So he didn't think it was crazy, and so he took it out. And usually with my books, it's always taken a while to sell them, weeks, months, a year. This one sold almost immediately, and it sold to this company in the UK, where Matt had actually had one of his books of poetry published. And so that's the story of how Baby Hawk began.

Sarah Harrison: 16:47

Very cool. There's a lot in there.

Tom Epperson: 16:52

Almost the story of my life.

Sarah Harrison: 16:55

We'll have more around that too. For our listeners, we're going to do a little feature-ette with Tom after this on One False Move his movies. I think there'll be some reminisces of going out to L.A. there. I'm not a poet myself. As we were talking earlier, Baby Hawk not a rhyming poem. It's not an iambic pentameter or anything like that. So how does it work for you mentally to craft the story in verse rather than just in paragraph form? How do you think about it or compose it differently than a regular story?

Tom Epperson: 17:38

Well, I'm glad you brought that up, and I hope no one will be put off, because it's a novel in verse. I never show my stuff while I'm writing it. I just keep it to myself and never talk about it. I know some writers take a different approach, but when I finished it, I gave it to my wife to read, because she always reads my stuff first. She was reluctant to read it because she says, Oh, I'm not really into poetry. I'm not going to understand it. I said, look, I promise you, just start reading two or three pages. You'll forget that it's poetry. And I just read the opening chapter. I think there's nothing in there that springs poetry at you. It just sounds like a novel or a short story. And in terms of writing, it was just fun to write. I mean, I knew I wanted to be free verse When I wrote poems in my teen years and 20s, most of them had rhyme and meter, but some had free verse. And there was no way this was going to have rhyme and meter. That would be crazy. I didn't want to write Paradise Lost or "Ode to a Nightingale" or anything. Baby Hawk was based on iambic pentameter, you know, like Shakespeare and Milton wrote, but no one would know that unless I told them. And I just started writing. And it was just fun. It was the most pleasant writing experience I think I've ever had. I mean, I love to write, but it's hard work to write, and this one just didn't seem like work. It just flowed. The idea just came out of nothing, and then Baby Hawk just flowed out of me. And when I finished the first draft, the first drafts are usually pretty. They're in pretty good shape. I don't do much rewriting, but I do some rewriting. I already rewrote anything in this it was just and then when I gave it to the publisher, usually the publisher has some notes. You can take them or not take them. The publisher basically had no notes. I mean, like, literally, three or four words changed like changed the B to an A. It was really remarkable the way the whole thing appeared.

Carolyn Daughters: 20:34

To what degree do you think that your experience as a screenwriter helped you with writing Baby Hawk. Because in screenwriting, it's about visceral moments, and you want the audience to connect. And the action in the sorts of movies that you've written, the action continuously flows. To what degree did that inform the writing that you did here?

Tom Epperson: 21:04

It was a big part of it. In fact, Baby Hawk is really, in a way, more like a screenplay than a novel. Because with screenplays, the imperative is to always keep the story moving. And when you write a screenplay, there's not room for a lot of fancy writing. I mean, fancy writing would get in the way. You want it to make it decent English. With screenplays, you really want to keep them moving. And the writing is pretty straightforward, I think, in the book. Screenplays are short. I mean, usually, the typical thing is under 20 pages. And one page equals a minute, roughly for a two-hour movie. And Baby Hawk is about the length of a screenplay. I think it's 33 pages or something. And so I think my screenplay writing really informs the writing of the book. It's more like a screenplay than a novel. In fact, I hope someday to write a real screenplay of this, because I want to turn into a movie.

Sarah Harrison: 22:30

Cool. I never realized screenplays were so short. I always just imagine them being longer.

Tom Epperson: 22:36

Oh no. You can sit down and read a screenplay in about two hours. And you can't sit down and read a novel and not even in two days, not even two weeks. So, yeah, they're short.

Sarah Harrison: 22:53

That makes total sense. As our regular listeners know, we're talking about historic novels. We spoil them to pieces and talk about the endings and the characters and everything like that. When we talk to our guests, we don't spoil their novels. But there are a couple of themes in Baby Hawk I wanted to ask you about without spoiling anything. First of all, the title. There seems to be some symbology with the main character around birds. She's thinking about birds, and she's seeing herself through birds. Is this a theme with you personally? Talk about the bird concept. How did that come into part of the story?

Tom Epperson: 23:45

Well, I am into birds and animals. I'm an animal person. I guess that's part of it. This is another thing that's just really weird about the title of the book. I mentioned that the working title was The Last Female on Earth, which I never thought was a good title. And then just three or four days after I started, I went on Facebook and an old high school friend I haven't seen since high school was writing about a family reunion. She had all these children and grandchildren, and so I was just reading down the list, and one of one of her grandchildren was called Baby Hawk. I thought, Wow, that's quite a name. I just got to use this in the book. There's a scene where the female is walking in the woods. She's remembering walking the wood she had with her father, and they discover a baby hawk at the base of a tree. And the hawk is very, very defiant and rears up with his wings, and looks at them, like, stay away from me. And so that state that stays in the girl's mind. That's where Baby Hawk came from. This bird is very, very important in the book as you both know, but it's not something I can really talk about.

Sarah Harrison: 25:47

Unpackage. I was surprised to see birds are going to show up again in One False Move. And I was like, hey, another bird.

Tom Epperson: 26:03

I'm trying to remember the birds in One False Move.

Sarah Harrison: 26:05

We'll talk about it more in the next episode. I have a really strong question about that.

Carolyn Daughters: 26:16

Talk a little bit about post-apocalyptic literature. This is a post apocalyptic story. An event has happened, and it has decimated the population. This may be the only woman left alive. As I'm reading, I'm reflecting back on all the post-apocalyptic literature that I've read, Handmaid's Tale and The Road, for example. It's a whole body of literature. What drew you to this end of the world story, or potential end of the world and the rebirth the Eve. This Adam and Eve sort of story.

Tom Epperson: 26:58

It's interesting. The Handmaid's Tale and The Road. Those are both great, great books. That's a good question. I think the novel that I mentioned that I was working on at the time that I got the suddenly I had the idea for Baby Hawk, and I set the novel aside, and then I picked it up again. I worked for three years on that novel, and I just finished it a month or two ago, and it's not post-apocalyptic, it's apocalyptic. This is on my mind these days, I think, because of the of the state of the world, and people who know me know I'm not an optimist about what's going on in the world. It just feels like everything's falling apart. And I'm not saying that in a political sense. I mean, I've felt that way for a long time. Mainly we're destroying the environment, the environment meaning nature. The environment just means the earth. Environmentalists aren't some little special interest group. They're people who care about our home, the earth. For the last few years, it's just like I can't stand to read the papers. I mean, such terrible things are going on. Four or five years ago, it was like we reached a turning point with global warming, and suddenly everyone everyone was doing stuff. Joe Biden came in and did some good stuff for the environment. And now over the last two or three years, it's like the people of the earth have made a collective decision not to worry about global warming, not to worry about the environment. Technology will take care of it, or it's not really a big of a problem, as the environmentalists say. It's just shocking and self-destructive. I just try not to be overwhelmed with gloom and sadness about it, because you can't live like that, or you can't live happily like that. I feel like some of my friends, especially since the last election, understandably, they can't believe how terrible things are. I feel the same way, but people who know me know I've been saying for 20 years, this is all going to fall apart. And a few years ago, at a July 4 barbecue, I said that I believe that we could have a fascist government in America. A really close friend of mine got furious with me. She was just so offended that I thought that that could happen here..

Sarah Harrison: 30:39

It's a little bit cute that your dogs are involved [in the background]. There's a dog in Baby Hawk as well. Animals are involved. The whole thing takes place in a forest. It's curious to me. I don't know if you have answers in your head, or if they were just intentional blank spaces, but you describe this global plague. The global plague affected only humans, but primarily women. That's what makes this girl so special to the world around her, and not any animals. Did you have an idea in your head why this would happen, or were you just creating a scenario to see how it would play out?

Tom Epperson: 31:27

I would say the latter. I called it "the sickness." Didn't get into what the symptoms were or how, what the theory was about, where it came from. From what little we learn as it probably happened, I think you can infer that it maybe happened in the last 10 or 15 years, just from the girl being 17 and the fact that she has memories being with her parents living in San Francisco.

Carolyn Daughters: 32:01

She had memories with her mother. For her to have those memories, maybe like 10 or 12 years or something.

Tom Epperson: 32:09

No one really talks about it. I just wanted that to be a given, whether it was some environmental thing, some plague that came because we went to a part of the rainforest we shouldn't have and or whether it was virus escaped from a lab or something. It does kill women more, but it's the kind of thing that wiped out 99% of the people on earth. But it was even worse for women. As far as these people know, the female in Baby Hawk is the only female on earth. No one's seen another female for three years.

Carolyn Daughters: 33:09

There's this group of men, and very quickly that number starts to dwindle a little bit. We won't get into the details, but it's not a very large group of men. Say, roughly 13 to 15 men, and this one woman, they have a couple dogs. At the beginning of the story, there's a caretaker, man who brings food to and from the females cabin, and maybe washes her clothes once a week, that sort of thing. But for all intents and purposes, these men share a mindset, and now they think differently. They have different personalities. Some are exceptionally bright, some are exceptionally stupid. There's one character at one point, she says, I would have liked him if he wasn't part of this mass of people continually raping me, I would have liked him. He has nice eyes, he's looks friendly, he looks caring. And yet, like so to what degree I was curious in reading this, like, if any group of people were all brought together, it seems like the lowest common denominator, like they all behaved collectively, very poorly. And there's a couple of outliers that we won't get into, but it took me aback to think that there weren't, there wasn't more pushback by most of these men. Like, did in your mind, like, if there was this collective would everybody behave badly, or would there be more else? Outspoken outliers, like, is this representative of what what would happen in this sort of situation?

Tom Epperson: 35:07

Well, we don't really know. The only people we meet in Baby Hawk are the girl and these and her father and flashbacks. And then these 16 men whose numbers begin to dwindle there. I think of them as being survivalist types, or white supremist types. I mean, I'm sure they've encountered other males along the way, and it probably didn't fare well for the other males. I think that they live their life. I think they're plundering and looting. Other humans that they actually happen to encounter. And what keeps him in line is the leader, Braden, who's a former, I don't know, probably a Green Beret or a special service guy in some way. And he's very fit. He washes his clothes all the time. He's not dirty. He doesn't wear a beard. He works out, he runs. He's this magnificent physical specimen. And a trained killer, also extremely smart. And he knows he's smart. And he looks down on them, on the men. He thinks, when I wanted these people survive, I mean, they're a bunch of dumb asses, and so he just has to keep them in line. As you said, there are a couple that are without giving away anything, a couple that are outliers and aren't like the others. I didn't want every male to be terrible. I mean, I want least a couple of them to be okay.

Carolyn Daughters: 37:13

And I wasn't taking it necessarily, as every male. It was like the people left were male, and this group, everybody, except for the female, is male. So I wasn't taking it as a judgment against mankind versus humankind. It was more, I guess in my heart I would hope, I would want more people to raise their hand and be like, No. Just, no. And it just seemed like to varying degrees, the people in this particular camp were on board with the schedule that they had for the visitation of the female. Dishearten me where I'm not. And so when I see the examples of some outlier behavior, I'm, as a reader, so excited. And when I see the resilience of the female, which we we see periodically when she has an opportunity, that also just heartens me, it just makes me so happy.

Tom Epperson: 38:22

Well, good. She's, that's the way, just I want people to react to it. She's, you probably remember the movie True Grit. There are a couple of versions of it, and the Coen brothers did a version a few years ago. I like the version, I think, from 1969 or thereabouts, with John Wayne. It's a Western that takes place mostly in Arkansas. The story is told in first person by an old woman who had this adventure when she was 14 years old, and she's feisty, and she's tough, she's resilient. She doesn't take any crap from anyone, and I think the female is along those lines. You're just you're supposed to root for her.

Carolyn Daughters: 39:25

Oh yes. I had one other question. This one might be quick, because it's only a question about the most difficult book in the world to read, which is Ulysses, which is what the female is reading. And I was like, Oh, interesting. How did you choose the book that the female in Baby Hawk is reading throughout her experience of captivity?

Tom Epperson: 40:03

Well, to begin with, not only have I read Ulysses, I read Ulysses twice, so I won't read it a third time, but in my younger days, when all I did was read, I read it twice and it's a masterpiece. Why Ulysses? I don't know, I just it just something that didn't have any deep meaning. It's just something that pops into my head. She has reading material there, a bunch of old magazines, dating from the pre-sickness days. And she has some books, and probably most of them are not very good books, but there's Ulysses, and for whatever reason, I want it to be a classic book. It could have been David Copperfield or whatever, but Ulysses just really worked. I think she spends the whole book trying to get through Ulysses. She's determined to read the whole thing. And those spoilers, we're not going to find out she ever read Ulysses.

Sarah Harrison: 41:12

That's funny. My final question is maybe a weird one. We talked a little bit in this conversation. And it also is a theme in Baby Hawk, like survivalism. It is a theme, obviously, in all post-apocalyptic literature, who is surviving? How are they surviving? What are the surviving skills they have? And then relating that to current times, I'm also, I would say, a bit of a cynic. In my mind. It's not if it happens, it's when and so, what kinds of ideas do you have? Do you take survivalism ideas out into the world, are you that concerned, or is it something just to play on in the book? Talk to me a little bit about your concept around survivalism and the skills needed.

Tom Epperson: 42:14

I don't know, the world collapse. If civilization collapse tomorrow, I'd be in in bad shape because I can't, I'm not. I can't do anything. I mean, I'm one of those guys. I'm not handy. But my wife, my wife, is Jewish, and she said, when she wound up with a non-Jewish guy, she thought he'd be handy, because Jewish guys are never handy. I'm not handy at all. Actually, Stephani is pretty handy. So I personally would be in trouble. I think, think what would happen if and when civilization collapses? Imagine when the power goes out and the power, there's a power outage, which happens in cities, and you can't turn on the lights, you can't turn on your computer. People just feel almost panicky into the power, when the power goes out, or if the power never came back again. I mean, what if the water didn't run through the pipes anymore? For if there was no one to help you, there was no police department, there was no fire department, most of all, what are people going to do without their without this with their cell phones? If people, younger people, but I'll go someplace. I go to the doctor's office, and all these old people are sitting there messing around with their phones. It's just like everyone and, well, younger people really aren't learning skills that they need. They don't even know basic math stuff anymore. They don't need to know anything. They don't know any practical things. I'm talking in generalities, people will die like flies. They won't just start dying. And in huge numbers, it won't take a plague for people to die. Civilized people are not prepared to live without their machines and their toys and so forth and so, I think, think everybody should. Maybe. When it happens, I think it'll, I think the collapse will happen suddenly and take everyone by surprise. It'll be like dominoes falling. And one system goes down, which makes another system go down, and it'll just happen. And I think it's coming, whether it's happening in a year or 25 years, but we can't keep doing this. We're destroying the earth, and we can't live a life of greed and violence. We're the animals who don't admit that we're animals. I mean, we think we're in this special class. And if someone behaves particularly badly, particularly violently, oh, that person acted like an animal, the animals don't do that. Animals don't murder their own kind. Animals don't rape and torture. The only animals that do that kind of thing are human animals. I mean, we're bringing this on ourselves, and unfortunately, we're bringing on all life on Earth, in a sense, that's what Baby Hawk is really about, because the female the book is dedicated to the forest, and the forest represents nature and really God, and she's very attuned to that, and she loves all creatures, and she's the type that can survive on her own.

Sarah Harrison: 46:42

Tom, you made me think of something, though, and you said you wouldn't survive. I don't know if you've watched any of the recent, I think they're Mad Max revivals, but there is a character in one of those who is the historian, and he just happens to write everything down.

Tom Epperson: 46:59

They'll have to do that the records, okay, hey, I'll be the historian. Just give me something, give me a pen. I'll tell stories. I'll make up stories about everybody.

Sarah Harrison: 47:12

The leaders would just take him with them everywhere to remind them what happened or why they're doing a certain thing, or use the historian on that just, I know that was supposed to be my last question, but then I just do really want to ask, given the body of literature that this is now a part of, do you have a favorite post apocalyptic work that you would recommend? Oh, what do you think our listeners should read or watch?

Tom Epperson: 47:50

Cormac McCarthy. He was a great writer, a very dark writer. I've had two or three reviewers say Baby Hawk reminds them of Cormac McCarthy, which is interesting because he wasn't in my head when I was writing it at all. But I think certain themes are the same. You know, The Handmaid's Tale. I don't know. I'm sure there are lots of good ones out there.

Sarah Harrison: 48:20

Awesome. Well, Tom, this has been delightful. Carolyn, did you have anything else?

Carolyn Daughters: 48:25

No, I was just going to say to learn more about Tom, check out his website. It's tomepperson.com. You've got lots of cool stuff on that site, including what I would say is one of the most fun bios I've read in ages. I recommend everyone check out tomepperson.com and read the bio and get Baby Hawk. We have a link to the book on our website.

Tom Epperson: 48:54

The bio is called the Tom Epperson story by Tom Epperson, as told to Tom Epperson, and the way that that came to be. I know I'm gonna wrap this up, but I'll just keep talking anyway. When I published my first book, The Kind One, hired publicist, Kim Dower, the great Kim from L.A. and she's told me that she needed a bio from me. And I thought, okay, so I wrote, I sat down and I wrote the Tom Epperson story for her, and it's thousands and thousands of words. I sent it to her, and she said, this is really great, but I was thinking more like maybe 75 words. So, I just put the long bio on my website.

Carolyn Daughters: 49:46

We're gonna talk a lot more about it in this next episode too. Because there's so much to unpack about your to New York, your trip to L.A. ,your screenwriting career. We have so much. I don't know if we told you, but this is going to be an eight-hour interview.

Tom Epperson: 50:03

All right. Well, I guess I better get some food in here.

Carolyn Daughters: 50:07

It's a really a good idea, actually, to order some.

Tom Epperson: 50:11

The dogs will probably be back by then, so I don't know how it's going to go with the dogs.

Sarah Harrison: 50:19

Listeners check out our upcoming episode, where we'll focus on Tom's movie One False Move and other interesting facts about his life. We hope you enjoyed this episode about Baby Hawk by Tom Epperson. If you did, it would mean the world to us if you would subscribe, and then you'll never miss an episode. Be sure to leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen to Tea, Tonic & Toxin. That way, likeminded folks can also find us. We're on all the platforms.

Carolyn Daughters: 50:53

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Sarah Harrison: 51:18

We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, Stay Mysterious.