The Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 brought forth a lot of things, including the inspiration for Trevin Nichols’ My Tiny Town Just Got Put on Lockdown. Trevin Nichols grew up in Iowa but moved to Leroy, Illinois as a kid where he graduated from high school. Now he works building maintenance at Country Financial and has a wife, three kids, and two pets. 

Trevin enjoys listening to YouTube narrations of stories. As Trevin described, “One day [he] was listening to a story and about halfway through it [he] was like ‘you know what I bet you I could try to write a story.’” From here he wrote the anthology Shadows of My Mind which has seven short stories in it. It didn’t pick up much traction, and then eight months later the pandemic hit. Trevin’s wife suggested that maybe he should write a lockdown story, and from there he took off. 

My Tiny Town Just Got Put on Lockdown takes place in McLean and is a sci-fi/horror novel. The book features a small-town family that begins to notice some strange occurrences. First, they begin to stop noticing people around, then an eerie, purple, shimmering fog rolls into town. The roads in and out of the town are blocked off by humvees, but no soldiers are around. Just as they thought nothing could get any more strange, the family begins to see creepy, otherworldly creatures lurking around their town. Before they know it it is a fight for survival and a fight to find a way out of the town and away from these creatures.

The family in the story is actually based on Trevin’s own family, a decision he said made it easier to write. Being able to know the ins and outs of a character like Trevin knows his own family made it easier to keep the story going and to write real reactions to certain events. 

Just this past Monday Trevin released the second novel of the series called The Study. This novel follows around a scientist in Florida who also begins to notice the strange fog and creatures that are present in the first novel of the series. Readers are able to get some explanation of what exactly is happening as they see these strange events unfold in a new perspective. If you would like to read any of Trevin’s work you can purchase them through Amazon on either an eBook or a physical copy.