Blog Archives
Alpha-Female
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts follows a teacher and trauma survivor who comes back to ordinary life after a brutal ordeal called Project Purple, only to find that ordinary life is no longer stable, and maybe never was. What inspired the idea of Project Purple, and how literal is it meant to be?
“Project Purple” is about thirteen Americans who recreate the lives of the early colonials for a worldwide online audience. They don’t know their ordeal has been gradually, brutally altered by their organizers, and a struggle for food, shelter, and survival turns deadly as an Arctic winter approaches.
The nutshell of this idea emerged from a conjoining of two mediums—the first being a PBS TV series called Colonial House back in 2003, and the second being an extraordinary novel about the harrowing saga of the Donner party called The Indifferent Stars Above. Somehow, the ordeals of these people from different centuries fused. I think “Project Purple” seeks to understand what it takes to draw on one’s inner survivor. I just started thinking: What could a writer do to give this story more adversity and more propulsion?
Purple Bleed Naughty Beats follows the three survivors of the ordeal that took place in the first book. The color purple, here, is the blending of red and blue that forms the majority of US political thought.
Henri lives in a constant state of uncertainty. Did you always intend for readers to question her reality?
Henri’s initial uncertainty is due to the medication foisted onto her. Once she kicks the downers, we can see her alpha-female persona reemerges.
The Rot feels physical, social, and spiritual all at once. How did you develop it as a unifying force?
The Rot begins in the first book—the beginning of a new world order with an entirely new language, and with an entirely new taxonomy: a new way of ordering and naming things in life—the Rhizome. It follows a fierce path of human destruction and rebirth in the second book, which is more about the cyclical nature of human history—how we progress to a certain point, only to fall back, destroying ourselves in senseless hatred and warfare. It’s loosely structured on a classic science fiction book called A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. If you remember that story, you can see similar plot devices and characters. And the message is, of course, the same.
The spiritual aspects of the story come from the role of the Catholic Church, which plays a large role in the affairs of state in Canticle. And it’s a monastery of monks that preserves history. Scientific discoveries are also, once again, made in the monastery.
What do you hope readers feel after the final page: clarity, dread, recognition?
When reading Canticle as an eighteen-year-old in a college science fiction class, I recall being stunned by what happens to the protagonist in the story. Killing one’s protagonist halfway through your book is not something anyone would recommend in a writing seminar. In Canticle, no character really picks up the slack to resume the mantle of lead. I’ve structured the story the same way, but Reygil steps up, and we follow him and his journey for answers in a post-apocalyptic world, some thirty years later.
I know a lot of readers don’t like somewhat open-ended messages, but I do them a lot. I hope they’re not disappointed that any stark resolution gives way to a weary kind of acceptance of a new world order—as the cycle continues.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
As the Rot spreads, it dissolves bodies, memories, and entire realities. Henrietta Dobie survives by instinct alone, guided by masked figures who insist she has been chosen for something greater. Each collapsing world forces the same brutal demand: adapt—or die.
Elsewhere, Reygil Buford staggers through the wreckage of civilization, torn between cowardice and grace. He wanders a landscape of false prophets, feral survivors, and absurd wars, where history repeats itself not as tragedy—but as grotesque farce.
Reality fractures. Empires decay. Survival becomes a test of the soul.
Darkly comic, hallucinatory, and unflinchingly violent, Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts is a genre-bending survival thriller where humanity consumes itself—and the only way forward may require becoming something unrecognizable.
What part of you must die so the rest can learn to fly?
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts is a work of speculative fiction that blends apocalyptic horror, satire, and psychological thriller elements into one jagged story. At its center is Henrietta Dobie, a teacher and trauma survivor who comes back to ordinary life after a brutal ordeal called Project Purple, only to find that ordinary life is no longer stable, and maybe never was. As Henri tries to navigate small-town routines, old classmates, a psych ward, and the creeping collapse of the country around her, the book keeps asking whether she is unraveling, seeing the truth, or trapped in some awful overlap between the two. That tension drives almost everything in the novel, and it gives the book its pulse.
The author writes with a mean streak, but also with real control. The book can be funny in a way that catches in your throat, then ugly, then sad, sometimes all in the same scene. A principal trying not to fart, a baby shower gift of shotgun shells, an Olive Garden that feels like a haunted checkpoint in the end times, all of that sounds absurd on paper, yet the writing commits so hard that it becomes its own reality. I also think the author makes a risky choice by pushing satire right up against trauma and social breakdown. Sometimes it feels brilliantly unhinged. Sometimes it feels like the book is daring you to keep up. For me, that mostly worked because Henri is never treated as a gimmick. She is bruised, sharp, isolated, and believable even when the world around her goes feral.
What I found most interesting is how the novel refuses to give easy comfort about what is “really” happening. The hallucinations, the bodily disgust, the public violence, the cult logic, the talk of worms in soft wood, all of it builds a world where decay is social, spiritual, and physical at once. That could have turned into noise, but Greco keeps returning to the same core ideas: betrayal, surveillance, hunger, the desire to belong, and the danger of surrendering yourself to a story that explains everything.
This is a bold, abrasive, and oddly mournful novel. I would recommend it most to readers who like genre fiction that crosses lines, especially people drawn to horror with satirical teeth, dystopian fiction that is less about neat world-building and more about psychic collapse, and stories that leave you unsettled rather than reassured. If you want something fierce, strange, and uniquely intriguing, this is a worthy read.
Pages: 190 | ASIN : B0GSCPBFS3
