Trevor Busch

Fascination with the possibility of an impending apocalypse has been a feature of countless generations down through history.
More primitive societies have seen impending doom in the appearance of a comet or a solar eclipse, while in the more recent past the fall of man was feared by any manner of theories that today we might consider quaint by comparison with the danger humanity faces at the dawn of the 21st century.
It was in the last century that humanity finally achieved the capacity to destroy itself completely through the advent of nuclear weapons. That apocalypse hasn’t happened — but we have come too close for comfort at points in the past for that bogeyman to have been completely purged from our collective consciousness.
Today, we are grappling with the spectre of global climate change, terrorism, and at present, the prospect of total financial collapse.
So apocalypse isn’t anything new. And the idea of the end of everything hasn’t lost any of it potency — it still features prominently as a theme in Hollywood film, in TV programs, in documentaries, in science fiction, and of course, in literature.
One such written compilation, The Apocalypse Reader (Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2007), is a collection of short stories which all speculate on the demise of humanity — or apocalypse from a more existential or esoteric perspective, rather than actual tangible destruction.
Edited by Justin Taylor, the work features short stories by well-known literary figures like H.P. Lovecraft, Nathanial Hawthorn, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as works by more obscure writers such as Rick Moody, Brian Evenson and Jeff Goldberg, among others.
While novels are often expositions of detail, short stories can sometimes be frustrating, as they only offer a snapshot.
There are those who are captivated and enthralled by the short story style, its artistic qualities, and its relative brevity.
Others find it to be a genre of writing devoid of much serious merit, inhabited by lazy authors unwilling or incapable of tackling a more ambitious work. The truth, as with so many other things, probably lies somewhere in between. In The Apocalypse Reader, those seeking linear, realistic action-adventure tales of a post-apocalyptic or apocalyptic nature would be better off looking elsewhere.
However, those seeking philosophical and psychological explorations of apocalypse that push the boundaries of reality or understanding — with this compilation you’ll be in for a treat.
Several of the works included bear special merit. H.P. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep is a haunting and vivid description of a dark prophet and his hypnotic powers over the populace of a dying world; Jared Hohl’s Fraise, Menthe, Et Poivre 1978 is a disturbing account which attacks some of the more traditional post-apocalyptic fantasies against the backdrop of a dead and dying Paris; Brian Evanson’s An Accounting tells of a people who so desperately want to believe in salvation they will believe in any salvation.
Others works, such as Rick Moody’s The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner, and Jeff Goldberg’s These Zombies Are Not a Metaphor, are darkly hilarious yet unsettling at the same time. In Moody’s work, Bob Paisner eventually concludes that unrequited love and misspent youth are his own personal apocalypse, while Goldberg asks the question of those who love the genre — are all of us zombies already?
A number of the other included works take a darkly light-hearted approach to the end of the world, at least in parts — after all, if there were nothing left to laugh at, surviving the end really wouldn’t be worth it.
The Apocalypse Reader is a fair compilation for those truly interested in exploring, again, the more existential aspects of the end of the world. Frankly, this leaves some of the works dry, and others utterly incomprehensible. And its title is somewhat of a red herring considering the subject matter and conclusions to some of the works — people might have picked up the volume, considering some of the authors included, and expected a vastly different collection.
However, it is still worthy of a look — if a selective one.