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These are the ways the world ends. Thirty-four new and selected Doomsday scenarios: an enthralling collection of work by canonical literary figures, contemporary masters, and a few rising stars, all of whom have looked into the future and found it missing. Across boundaries of place and time, these writers celebrate the variety and vitality of the short story as a form by writing their own conclusions to the story of the world. Obliteration has never hurt so good. Contributors include Grace Aguilar, Steve Aylett, Robert Bradley, Dennis Cooper, Lucy Corin, Elliott David, Matthew Derby, Carol Emshwiller, Brian Evenson, Neil Gaiman, Jeff Goldberg, Theodora Goss, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jared Hohl, Shelley Jackson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stacey Levine, Tao Lin, Kelly Link, H.P. Lovecraft, Gary Lutz, Rick Moody, Michael Moorcock, Adam Nemett, Josip Novakovich, Joyce Carol Oates, Colette Phair, Edgar Allan Poe, Terese Svoboda, Justin Taylor, Lynne Tillman, Deb Olin, Unferth, H.G. Wells, Allison Whittenberg, and Diane Williams.… (more)
User reviews
Rick Moody's piece is slick, accomplished, and glib. I wonder how quickly the sense of accomplishment fades for a writer like that. Reading it is like watching a sparkler: it's ash in seconds.
Dennis Cooper's piece is a meditation on the asshole of a 13-year-old boy: it is harsh and strident, and reminds me of a critique of "The Exorcist": someone said it was like grain alcohol, very strong but probably not good for you. Is a single strong image really an effective critique?
The rest is often weakly imagined fluff, with the usual one-off lines that sprinkle postmodern fiction and make it seem worthwhile: the moment the President comes on TV and shows people it's OK to eat cockroaches; an apocalypse that happens suddenly at the end of a story, when "a torrent of blood comes crashing through the trees." (Robert Bradley) But Nietzsche's critique of Wagner's reliance on small-scale effects would be pertinent to much of contemporary North American postmodern fiction: it has no sense of larger architecture, it feels that emotions are tiny, sharp things that can only be captured haphazardly, in minute quantities, like pins found in a haystack.