Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

This sweeping cultural history from journalist Lynskey (The Ministry of Truth) chronicles how films, novels, and other media have imagined the apocalypse from ancient times through the present. He explains that cultures across the world held a cyclical understanding of time until ancient Persian Zoroastrians developed a linear view that influenced Judaism and Christianity, as reflected in the Book of Revelation’s “bloodthirsty, psychedelic visions” of fiery end times. Contending that artists have used apocalyptic stories to make sense of global and personal tragedies, Lynskey discusses how Lord Byron composed the poem “Darkness” to reckon with the blackened skies and failed harvests caused by the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies, and how Mary Shelley wrote her dystopian 1826 novel The Last Man, about a plague that nearly eliminates humanity, to work through her grief over the deaths of her husband and children. “Writers of fictional doomsdays all reveal what they love or hate about the world... and what they fear,” Lynskey argues, exploring how such films as Godzilla dramatized anxieties over nuclear weapons, and how Don’t Look Up took a scathing view of indifference to climate change. Lynskey’s astute analysis excels at teasing out the existential concerns that have animated artists over the course of millennia. Readers won’t want this to end. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Calligraph. (Jan.)