When our civilization ends, be it with a bang or a whimper, what will follow? The prospect of a post-apocalyptic wasteland ought to be fertile ground for any writer, but very few memorable works have sprung up from its craters: Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, and a handful of science fiction classics by the likes of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury.
There certainly has been no shortage of movies on the subject, from masterpieces like Mad Max and Planet of the Apes to mercifully forgotten dross like Def-Con 4 and Hell Comes to Frogtown—in which the professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper must save humanity by rescuing the last fertile women from mutant amphibians. Perhaps there is something so unthinkable about the decline and fall of human empire that it tends to inspire the merely lurid or ridiculous. But it isn’t unthinkable—not any longer, not with suitcase nukes waiting in the trunk of the Hidden Imam’s welcome wagon. It won’t be long before the real “day after” gains an insistent grip on the imaginations of our best creators.
Cormac McCarthy should be just the right Virgil for a tour of this Last Judgment. At a time when many writers bury their heads in sands of frivolity and childish fantasy, he retains the understanding that we live in a postlapsarian world, peopled with violent, unpredictable creatures. His previous book, No Country for Old Men, was not
