(4 / 5)
“It’s the end of the word as we know it, and I feel fine.”
Sometime in the near future the world has become a dystopian society where apocalypses of all sizes and magnitude are a normal part of life’s routine. Unlike other post-apocalyptic fiction, the world of Apocalypse All the Time is collapsing from every kind of imaginable horror – impact apocalypses, nuclear, climate change, zombie, and even alien invasion apocalypses. Marshall is sick of it. Life is constantly in danger and continually disrupted by one apocalypse or another, but nothing significant ever changes and no one seems to die. Ever. The emergencies are always handled by the Apocalypse Amelioration Agency and their Wizard of Oz-like leader, Malcolm. Like the best heroes of fiction, Marshall is out to change that. But instead of saving the world, he sets out to stop the reign of apocalypses.
Quirky and entertaining, Apocalypse All The Time paints a vivid picture of a world gone weird and one man’s daily struggle to manage while life crumbles around him on a regular basis. What makes Apocalypse All The Time unique isn’t the subject matter. The end of the world has been coming in literature for years, and America as we know it has been decimated and destroyed repeatedly by plagues, disease, explosions, and the un-dead. What makes this book different is that while Doomsday keeps coming, the world averts disaster over and over until one man decides he has had enough. In Not Quite So Stories, Atkinson examined society’s need to explain and demystify the world through short stories that concluded that life is so absurd, it is beyond our comprehension. In Apocalypse All the Time he explores the impact an allure with apocalypticism can have on the way we live our lives and the effect it has on us. It is an absurdly funny exploration of society’s fascination with the end of the world and the trend of endless apocalypse predictions.