The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of the Apocalypse

The author of The Wet Collection returns with a second collection of essays, this time with an apocalyptic bent. The book’s 21 selections—an odd commingling of dark tourism travelogues, voyeuristic impulses, and elegaic musings on the past, present, and future—take Tevis’s readers on a visceral journey from decaying railroad towns in North Dakota, where “the line between living and ghost wasn’t always obvious,” to the “Doom Town” at the Nevada atomic test site, a row of houses inhabited by mannequins “with eyes like apple seeds.” Tevis’s writing is utterly beautiful and authentically her own, driven by a deep-seated need to share the images that haunt her. Individual essays feel like the literary equivalent of long exhalations after holding one’s breath, a passionate outpouring of description and revelation (“This is no ordinary sea, no ordinary sunset, and despite its calm surface, the water reminds me somehow of solvent... This is water with an opinion”). Tevis does not provide the literary equivalent of any “duck and cover” directives for readers—her prose demands we must meet her in her burning world—but once we get there, the rewards are rich. [em](May) [/em]