Ike Honeycutt
The Midwest Collapse Series
Ike Honeycutt writes unflinching, character-driven fiction rooted in the American Midwest. His novels explore what happens when society begins to unravel.He is the author of The Midwest Collapse Series, beginning with The Things We Take.When not writing, he spends his time outdoors with his family, chasing the small skills and routines that make life feel a little more durable.He lives in the Midwest.
The Things We Take (Book 1)
Grid down.
Society collapsing.
One family on the run.A catastrophic solar storm — stronger than any EMP — destroys the power grid and plunges the Midwest into chaos. Overnight, modern life vanishes.
Ben Mercer is no hero — just a father haunted by his past. Now he, his wife Emily, and their young daughters Grace and Eve must fight to survive as hunger spreads faster than hope and their suburban neighborhood descends into violence.
Every mile in search of safety forces impossible choices — and proves that survival is about more than supplies or prepper know-how. It’s about love, memory, and the fragile bonds that hold a family together when everything else falls apart.
The Things We Take ignites The Midwest Collapse Series — a gripping, deeply human story of family, survival, and resilience in a collapsing world, perfect for fans of One Second After, Edge of Collapse, and Station Eleven.
The Things We Hide (Book 2)
Winter closing in.
Old demons unravel.
A new threat rising beyond the farm.Ben, Grace, and Eve reach the Mercer farm broken from the road.
Winter hits hard, and grief drags Ben toward old habits he swore he’d left behind.
A single violent mistake ignites a feud with a neighboring family, and as hunger and cold deepen, a rising threat beyond the farm forces a tense alliance.
To keep his daughters safe, Ben must face the darkness inside him… before it takes everything he has left.
The Things We Become (Book 3)
Trauma doesn't fade.
Memory does.
Some losses can't be survived twice.Ben Mercer and his daughters survived a brutal winter on their family farm, enduring the siege, the cold, and the grief that followed.
Months after a solar flare destroyed the power grid, spring brings calmer days — but the past is slipping away. What his daughters remember grows hazier by the week. What they’ve forgotten may never come back.
Before it’s too late, Ben makes a desperate choice that takes him into the heart of the State recovery program — and toward the dangerous machinery rebuilding the world.
What he finds there could return a piece of what his daughters have lost.
Or cost him everything.
Midwest Collapse: An Oral history (companion novel)
Thirty-five voices.
Not all of them innocent.
A region that refused to die.August 15, 2025. A solar storm destroys the power grid.
The collapse that follows claims more than two hundred million American lives.
Twenty years later, a historian travels across the Midwest looking for the ones who made it.
An astronomer who watched the sky turn green over Indiana. A pilot forced to land a crippled jet on an interstate. A pastor who has spent twenty years preaching grace while living with what he did. A prison warden carrying a decision he has never spoken of since. Farmers, doctors, teachers, refugees, soldiers, and children trying to make sense of the day the modern world ended.
What they did to survive. What it cost them. And what was built from the wreckage.
Midwest Collapse: An Oral History is a standalone companion to The Midwest Collapse Series.
Sovereign (Fall 2026)
Father & daughter.
Divided by ideology.
Bound by blood.Mason Ward raised his daughter alone on seven off-grid acres outside Cotter, Indiana. He taught her to shoot, to think for herself, and to not trust the State.
She became a cop anyway.
When a traffic stop turns fatal and the county comes down hard on everyone Mason has ever known, June Cutler finds herself on the wrong side of a manhunt for her own father — a man whose face she recognized on a murder scene dash cam and whose name she kept to herself.
Sovereign is a novel about the cost of conviction, the weight of blood, and what a father will do to protect his daughter — even from the law she swore to uphold.
