Where Tales from the Loop covered the narrator's childhood years, Things from the Flood recalls his stories from his teenage days from 1995 to 1999. As a result, many of the familiar elements found in this art will have a more 90's feel to it over the distinctly 80's style found in Tales from the Loop.
The narrator's life ends up taking an unexpected turn when he and many of the families in his area are forced to leave their homes and relocate to a different part of the island. Strange waters bubble up from the Loop and into everyone's basements. With the narrator's parents already divorced, he and his mother move in with her boyfriend. There, the young teen makes a new best friend in his neighbor Lo and the two of them have many adventures exploring the area around this new landscape.
Like in the previous book, many of those adventures are depicted by artwork that is a mix of the normal and the strange. Peaceful fields are scattered with odd machines and robots and even some unusual creatures, and the art typically shows curious kids examining their surroundings with reckless abandon. When the "machine cancer" hits, causing the robots to start growing random, grotesque, almost biological components, the world around the narrator gets even more unusual and while the teenagers hear many strange theories about the cause, it doesn't seem to hinder their curiosity in any way.
Through the short stories told in Things from the Flood, we also see the narrator grow from the child, displaced from his home, to a young adult whose focuses switch from playing outside and on computers, to girls and parties, and even though the world around the narrator isn't quite our own, Stålenhag shows, both through art and words, that it isn't far from the Earth we know.
