People want disaster.

So I've discovered something.  Something amazing.  Something that will blow your mind.  Probably.  You know what, it might not.  In fact, it's pretty much common sense.

When people read, they want disaster.  Lots, and lots, of disaster.

They want death, destruction, pain, sadness, regret, loss, irreparable nerve damage.  

If you've noticed, you get the most involved in stories where bad things happen.  You are most tense when something is seriously at stake.  When disaster lingers over every corner.  When people shatter.  Buildings crash.  Things explode.  Plans unravel at their seams.  You want bad things to happen.  

Do you remember the last part of the Mockingjay, in the hunger games?  

Do you remember how intense it was?  How putting it down right after-

 Finnick dies was almost inconceivable?  How, after that one girl gets her face melted off, that no one could have gotten you to put the book down?  

You know how, in All Quiet on the Western Front, you come out with an almost shell-shocked sense of reality?  How you can't put it down because so many damn bad things happen?

In case you're wondering, my theory is that people like to experience bad things in book because it's a safe way for them to internalize solutions to deadly problems that other people have experienced, and I think it's an evolutionary adaptation that allows for intuitive internalization of lessons that others have learned though situations that would be terrible to put ourselves through.  In short, we like to learn how to survive in situations we might encounter in the future, however remote they might be.  Even if it means watching the death of that character.  We think "this is what I would have done to avoid this."  We simulate ourselves in the situations that the characters experience.  And thus, the book draws us in.  It is effective in its narrative. Not because of good character development.  Not because of good overall story arcs.  But because people are in danger and die.

And as such, as a writer, I will provide.  I will rip out your guts with my storytelling, so that you don't have to experience them ripped out of your body in real life.  I will kill people to show you how it's done.  

Here's my story idea.  

Zombies.

Air raids.

The Johnestown flood.

Fire.

A nuclear meltdown.

All in a single day, in a single chain of unfortunate events.  One after the other.  They all go down.  And everybody experiences it.  People will die.  Some might get torn apart by zombies.  Some might perish in the military bombing campaign.  Some might drown beneath a sixty-meter high wall of rushing water out of a broken dam.  Some might burn to a crisp in the oil-fed fires that coat the top of the water.  Some might die from radiation burns.  

And some might survive.  But they will never be the same.

It will be epic.