One of the many things that writer Jane Ozkowski and I have bonded over in our ancient friendship is our shared love of coming of age stories. All kinds of them. We went through our (embarrassing) Garden State phase, the Juno phase, the Wes Anderson-Everything phase, and more recently Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name phases. All this to say, it made perfect sense to me when Ozkowski brought her own voice to this stacked genre. Stealing from the quirkiness that’s come before us, with the added stakes of an apocalyptic mid-survival story, We Used to Bury Them was born.

The thing about the end of the world is that if you survived it… life would just keep going. Doubtless there would be struggles, but when the mutant/raider/thieves had clocked out for the day, and you’d foraged all you could, there’d still be hours to fill. Empty hours that would beg for jokes, stories, songs, and maybe some light crafting. Leah, our main character was born into such an empty world with no other humans that she ever remembers meeting besides her older guardian, Marve. They don’t have much in common, and Marve, while focusing on their survival, hasn’t been much of a mentor to Leah. This has left her in a state of arrested development, with no friends but the ones she makes up, and no reference points for her own milestones.

Enter Laura, an almost dead body, poisoned by toxic stream water, that in another life might have had a lot in common with Leah. They could’ve been friends, sisters, or even born in the other’s place. When Laura finally bites the dust, Leah comes to terms with death, and life, in a way that Marve no longer needs to shelter her from. Amid a backdrop of desolation, We Used to Bury Them is a story of human tradition, with humour and colour.