Some American evangelicals have welcomed the coronavirus pandemic as signalling the end times, and Donald Trump as an improbable messiah. US citizens have been stocking up on guns and ammo, just as countless films about the zombie apocalypse have taught them to. It might therefore look like bad timing to publish a book that gently mocks those who have for years been preparing for the collapse of normal society. At the same time, Mark O’Connell understands the hunger for change, and the fear that it might actually be upon us. Apocalyptic fiction is as old as storytelling, he notes. “But what if now it’s especially the end of the world, by which I mean even more the end of the world: really and truly and at long last the end (or something like it)?”
In this essay-cum-travelogue, the author visits an old army facility in South Dakota that has been repurposed by an apocalypse entrepreneur as a city of hundreds of modern luxury bunkers, to which the well-heeled might retreat in case of nuclear attack or other disaster. “All of this was a logical extension of the gated community,” O’Connell observes. “I have some sympathy for the builders of bunkers, the hoarders of freeze-dried foodstuffs. I understand the fear, the desire for it to be assuaged. But more than I want my fear assuaged, I want to resist the urge to climb into a hole.”
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