About the Book

Book: All That Glows

Author: Lauren Smyth

Genre: YA Dystopian Science Fiction

Release Date: May 12, 2026

The apocalypse didn’t take everyone. It just took us.

Ever since the rain turned green, Kyrie’s world has been bathed in glowing dust. She packs it into old mascara tubes and sells it as makeup alongside dried cacti, threadbare blankets, and long-expired canned food. There’s not much else to do when everyone outside Kyrie’s small town in the Mojave Desert died from the plague-bearing rain ten years ago.

Everyone—except the man in the rubber mask.

He’s on the dangerous side of the fence, huffing infected air like it’s nothing, babbling to Kyrie about college and umbrellas and yogurt and everything else that disappeared the day it rained. He doesn’t seem to know that the world ended, and he has no explanation for how he survived the apocalypse. But Kyrie doesn’t believe in ghosts.

She can’t trust him, but he’s right about one thing: Towns without secrets aren’t surrounded by chain-link fences. And chain-link fences won’t keep out the plague forever.

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About the Author

Lauren Smyth is an economics journalist at World News Group. Since signing her first publishing contract at age thirteen, she has written five young adult novels, coded two narrative video games, and started a blog enjoyed by readers and writers around the world. When she’s not in the broadcast studio, you’ll find her crafting episodes of her Grammar Minute writing podcast or training for her next trail run.

More from Lauren

You’d think the apocalypse already happened in Mojave, CA.

Toxic dust could invade your lungs and kill you. Owls burrowed in the ground for lack of trees. Bobcats mated and had their kittens on neighborhood roofs, and every so often, a jet screamed overhead with a thunderclap in its wake.

I arrived in the middle of the night, and when I woke up, I was in a world different from any I had ever known. As a military kid, I had eaten fresh Belgian waffles, stood drenched in Ohio rain, and fallen asleep to Las Vegas lights. But I had never seen a place so unearthly, or so tantalizingly mysterious, as Edwards Air Force Base. I stood at the window and goggled at the scenery for a while. And then I began to make it my own.

One of the first things Edwards AFB taught me was how to write. That was a byproduct of my decision, at a mature eight years old, to become a detective.

My friends and I climbed into a ditch and found a broken arrow, half the feathers ripped away, the point still intact. An assassination attempt, of course. Old golf balls buried in the dirt—secret messages to a dangerous enemy. The allure of jets overhead, of opaque military acronyms, of drab camouflage and deadly temperatures and rumors of drug lords and cowboys and sand sharks wandering the desert, gave wings to our imaginations.

The first story I wrote was a collection of “clues” we’d gathered, an attempt to frame them all into a narrative that explained how the base was going to be attacked and how we—well-prepared with our military IDs and iPods—would save everyone. I started writing in a notebook with a hot pink cover, and a hundred more notebooks kept up the thread. The story wasn’t yet a book. But it was my first attempt at weaving a story greater than anything I had experienced.

Fourteen years have passed. All That Glows is my fifth book. It’s based on everything that came before it—most importantly, on Mojave and Edwards AFB and all the time I spent trying to tease out the desert’s mystery. It captures what I felt when I was there: small, under the broad desert sky and the huge airplanes; large, compared to the tarantulas that scuttled past my boots in the dust; melancholy, when I thought of how far away the rest of the world was; determined and thrilled, as I dove into the adventure I was living and the ones I hadn’t lived yet.

In All That Glows, you’ll poke your finger on cacti needles and get your shoes tangled in grabby creosote. You’ll experience the blazing daytime heat, the tumbleweeds, the bland architecture, and the rest of Edwards AFB’s unusual scenery, all set in fictional towns. You’ll count the desert stars and shiver in the cold twilight wind. You’ll have a mystery of your own to solve, and if you can stick it out to the end, you’ll have befriended a dry-humored, scrappy cast of characters.

Here’s the first line from one of those old notebooks: “When can we go outside, Mom?”

And here’s the first paragraph of All That Glows: “On the night the world ended, raindrops stained our roof tiles green. I was the first to notice when I went outside to dump the dishwater.”

A lot has changed, but the sense of adventure Mojave taught me hasn’t. If anything, since then, the mystery from back then has only heightened. Maybe the golf balls weren’t a secret message, but maybe a new kind of missile was tested while I was there. Maybe the broken arrow was just a kid playing in his backyard, but maybe one of those jets flew faster than sound seven times over.

I won’t ever know. I only have my memories. But I can imagine the battles and the sacrifice and the bravery. And so, if you’ll join me for this expedition, I’ll show you what my mind’s eye saw when I looked out across the desert.

Author Interview

How has your life experience helped in your writing journey?

All That Glows is based on my childhood at Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave, California. Something about this place exudes mystery. Maybe it’s the fact that you have to stay inside when the wind blows because the dust contains toxic spores that can kill you. Or maybe it’s the fact that you can’t pet the kittens because they’re not kittens at all—they’re mountain lions that will mate and have litters on your roof. Or maybe it’s the owls that burrow in the ground, since there aren’t any trees. Everything in Mojave is backwards and upside down, and most of it is trying to kill you. When you’re young with a big imagination, it’s a delightful place to grow up.

My friends and I used to pretend—somewhat seriously, and quite pretentiously—that the military base was under attack, and we would be the ones to solve the mystery and save the base. This book is a distant, well-developed, standalone offshoot of that childhood fantasy.

Now that I’m an adult, I like challenges with a real possibility of failure. In my mind, they’re low-risk. If you fail, you immediately understand why and don’t beat yourself up over it. If you succeed, you feel fantastic. So I try to do something that scares me semi-regularly—which is good practice for the terrifying, lengthy, and soul-baring activity of writing a book. What scares me won’t scare everyone, but here are some recent adventures: running a nine-mile race in an obscure corner of rural Montana, getting my EMT license and treating real patients, giving a speech to strangers, performing on camera, traveling solo, and signing up for a Spartan race.

What is the funniest thing to happen in the process of writing one of your books?

I wrote parts of All That Glows sitting on the beach in Florida. One evening, I pitched my camp too close to the water. The tide came in and subsumed my towel. I panicked. I held my laptop high above my head to keep it from getting wet, but that took both my hands, and I wasn’t able to grab my phone.

The poor thing survived but spent the rest of the evening emitting sparks and groans of electronic agony. When at last the screen blinked off, I figured that was the end of it. So I packed the now-paperweight into my suitcase, went to sleep, and forgot about it.

Around midnight, a siren blared. I was mummified in sheets, totally drowsy, and couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Then I heard a muffled voice say, “Hello? This is 9-1-1. Is anyone there?”

That got my attention, but I still wasn’t awake enough to realize what was happening—only that the voice was somehow coming from my suitcase. I flung myself out of bed and staggered over to investigate. When I finally identified my waterlogged phone and picked it up, I was horrified to see my nighttime self reflected on the screen. To this day, I don’t know if I video-called 9-1-1, or if I just happened to activate the camera at the same time the phone made the call.

I don’t remember how many times I apologized to the very kind, very businesslike operator. I lay awake the rest of the night sweating, wondering if I was going to jail for a false 9-1-1 call. Spoiler alert: I did not.

How do you relax after a long day of writing?

I stop exercising my brain and start exercising my body. I love a good sunset run or occasionally a nighttime, headlamps-required, bear-spray-suggested trail race. (Races also come with snacks, usually, which is an incredible perk worth the $50 entrance fee.) I love to hike, bike, swim, paddleboard, play pickleball, and do almost anything that takes me outside and gets me moving.

If it’s been a seriously tedious day, you might also catch me rocking out to “Rasputin” on Just Dance. In a past life, I did a summer intensive with the Bolshoi Ballet, where I learned Russian character dance. There aren’t many chances for me to use that skill now … except in the game!

Do you have extensive outlines when writing or do you write a book as you go?

As a journalist (my day job), I outline everything methodically. I hand-write the broad topics in my reporter’s notebook, then write the first sentence of each paragraph in a Google doc. All I have to do at that point is fill in the research and the quotes, and voila—an article appears, almost as if I had nothing to do with it.

As a fiction writer, I jump in feet-first with no life raft and no escape plan. I don’t outline anything and often don’t even have a coherent plot in mind when I start writing. I don’t always start at the beginning of the book, and I don’t write in order. The result is a tangled mess of disconnected scenes and inarticulate lore, which I mostly unravel before the manuscript gets to my editors. Then, if there’s anything I’ve missed (and there always is), they help me get it sorted.

Do you remember the first book you read? What sort of impact did it make on you?

I’m told the first book I “read” was a kids’ book about Snoopy. I turned the pages in all the right places, but when my parents took the book from me, they discovered I could still “read” just fine without it! I’d memorized it from all the times they read it to me. I wasn’t in school yet, but my mom, who was a college professor in a past life, figured it was time to teach me how to read for real.

The first book that completely captivated me was The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I found an ancient copy of it in our family book stash and read it when I was maybe seven or eight years old. It was a quick favorite, and slowly I started collecting other books in that series. I could tell which ones were written by different people, and I think that helped me learn about different styles of writing and how to make my voice my own.

The first “adult” book I read was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, a late-1800s novel by one of the original science fiction masters. It was on my school reading list—why, I don’t exactly know—and I had a copy with a perfectly flexible spine, the kind that just makes you want to sit down and turn the pages. My parents took me out to lunch, and I propped that book up against my plate to finish it. I couldn’t put it down. I ended up reading almost all of Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages series after that, and I knew I’d have to write some sci-fi of my own.