Why a Lost DC Novel Is Getting New Attention

One day more than 50 years ago, Carolivia Herron was stepping onto the curb at Piney Branch Road and Underwood Street, Northwest, when she was struck by a vision: a striking woman on the sidewalk, silhouetted by the sky, her hand raised in a gesture of repudiation. “It was like, ‘Oh, wow, who is she? I’ve got to know her story,’ ” Herron says. The woman was imaginary, but powerful enough to start Herron’s wheels spinning. When she got home, she began to write.

Herron, a classics lecturer at Howard University, tells this story while sitting at a coffee shop in the same neighborhood, where we’ve met up to discuss the resulting dystopian novel, Thereafter Johnnie, which is about, among other things, the character based on that woman and her daughter. First published 34 years ago by Random House, the cult classic is now being reissued by McNally Editions, a Manhattan publisher devoted to bringing attention to underappreciated work. “Ever since Thereafter Johnnie went out of print, I have believed that it would be back one day,” Herron says. “But I thought it would come after my death. It’s a great joy and surprise to see it reissued in my lifetime.”

Enigmatic and fable-like, the novel is set in DC, and reviewers at the time compared it to James Joyce’s take on Dublin in his works. Thereafter Johnnie is structured to mirror Milton’s Paradise Lost. Narrated from a future after the fall of the American empire, it tells the story of a family split by incest—a metaphor for slavery, the nation’s original sin.

Critics loved it: A New York Times review declared that it belonged in the company of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills. But the book never found a big audience. “It doesn’t fall comfortably into any one particular genre,” says Jeremy Davies, the editor who oversaw the reissue. “It’s extremely ambitious. It takes in a whole bunch of registers and literary approaches, from biblical to classical to poetic to supernatural and science-fictiony.”

Herron was born and raised in the District; her mother was a longtime science teacher in the public schools. But Herron gravitated toward literature—she was the kind of precocious reader who around ten years old discovered Paradise Lost at the Carnegie Library. Herron has since taught at a number of colleges, including Harvard and Mount Holyoke. She returned to DC full-time in 2017, when Howard hired her.

The city has changed in major ways since she painted such a rich portrait in her novel. (The Carnegie Library, for example, now contains an Apple Store.) Still, Herron doesn’t spend a lot of time contemplating the state of modern-day Washington. “Maybe it’s the classics part of me, or maybe I have a fog over my eyes,” she says. “It feels like I’m in 1975 looking toward 2075.”

Thereafter Johnnie predicts a grim end to America, but the author doesn’t expect its dystopia to arrive soon, current events notwithstanding. “As a classicist, I know that no empire lasts forever,” Herron says. “But I want to give a message of peace rather than one of descent. Rome did not fall in a day. It took many hundreds of years and many bad leaders—not just one.”

This article appears in the September 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Ike Allen

Assistant Editor