All Horsemen, All The Time

Or, why I picked the exact wrong year to start researching a book about the end of the world.

- Mark O'Connell

OVER A YEAR AGO, in an era long past, I began inquiring into the matter of the apocalypse. It is important to remember that it was still possible, way back in the early autumn of 2016, to reflect upon the end of the world as an abstraction. I had decided that I was going to write a book about apocalyptic dread— about, among other things, its various manifestations in contemporary culture, as well as my own anxieties (as a father of a 3-year old, and more generally as a human being) about ecological catastrophe, the instability of globalized economic systems, the prospect of nuclear devastation, and other sources of general bad vibes.

The project required a cultural diet of raw apocalypticism. For me, a typical day might have involved kicking back with a film about the end of the world—a Take Shelter, say, or a Time of the Wolf—before curling up with a fictional cataclysm like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, in which a group of Australians, among the last living humans, calmly fill their final days as they await the southward drift of nuclear fallout. As troubling as this topic was, it was possible to keep it at arm’s length, to encounter it at the level of abstraction. Then, one year ago, around the second week of November—for reasons it is not necessary to reiterate—the apocalypse came to seem significantly less abstract.