Stories about the end of the world feel like a relief to me. Here's why
Spiking confrontation in the Middle East is leading some spectators to contemplate the end of the world. In one chapter of his new book 'In Crisis, On Crisis,' writer and Wilfrid Laurier University professor explores the apocalypse's cultural appeal.
We go to end-of-the-world fiction for two obvious reasons. First, we want distraction. Explosions onscreen can block out explosions in our lives. I'd rather worry about storms in the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' than the tasks I said I'd finish before actual tomorrow.
Second, perhaps incongruously, we want to feel hopeful. In Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower,' civilization is collapsing, yet Lauren
Olamina
never wavers from her commitment to survival and rebirth. At the end of
Waubgeshig
Rice's 'Moon of the Crusted Snow,' the
Anishinaabe
community leaves its apocalypse-ravaged reservation for a new beginning in the woods. Even
Cormac
McCarthy's 'emotionally shattering' 'The Road' ends with the adoption of the newly orphaned boy in the wake of his dead father's command to go on. The moral of the stories: We, humanity, shall overcome.
Rumaan
Alam's
apocalyptic novel 'Leave the World Behind' enchants for a different reason. By painting a picture of total human annihilation — no plucky survivors, no one spared by design or by chance — the book offers the relief of surrender.
Alam's
novel begins with a white, middle-class family arriving at a bucolic vacation home east of New York City. The family splashes in the pool and fantasizes about owning marble
countertops
, solid oak floors, ample space. The mom, Amanda, can't resist checking her work email. Clay, the dad, sneaks cigarettes in the driveway. The kids — Rose, 10, and Archie, 13 — look at their phones.
The centrality of technology is true to life and crucial to the plot. Cell signals, the internet and cable television stop working shortly after the family lands in the countryside. Probably, they think, their remote vacation spot is beyond reach of satellite networks. That night, though, when the owners of the house, the
Washingtons
, a kind, elderly Black couple, show up and ask to stay, Clay and Amanda learn that the loss of service is widespread.
Drama unfolds on two tracks. There is tension between the families. Clay and Amanda are suspicious of the
Washingtons
, which has as much to do with the white couple's latent racism as with the unexpected appearance of the homeowners. Who has the right to call the shots: the white renters or the Black deed-holders? At what point does valid speculation about the crisis slide into harmful paranoia?
On a second narrative track, the world is ending. The reader understands this early in the book more clearly than the characters ever do. There's plenty of evidence on Long Island that something is wrong. The blackout, communication breakdown, a deafening noise overhead, terrified neighbours, flamingos in the pool. A few days after the vacation begins, Archie's teeth fall out. The families know there is trouble, they are in trouble, but they never understand the extent of it. Not knowing is part of their terror.
Around the novel's midpoint, a horrifying noise erupts from the sky. The noise divides the families' lives in two: 'the period before they'd heard the noise and the period after.' Inside the novel, no one discovers the source of the sound. However, readers learn from the Voice of God narrator (
VOG
) that top-secret fighter jets are scrambling toward a new era of battle over the eastern seaboard.
If there were no
VOG
interruptions, no recurring omniscient assurances anchoring the contingencies of the interpersonal plot to the certainty of global apocalypse, 'Leave the World Behind'
would be an anxiety novel. Is Armageddon nigh or not? Some of my favourite books are anxiety novels.
Arguably, the end-of-the-world anxiety novel is scarier than speculative end-of-the-world fiction. Anxiety is torturous, paralyzing. It's a truism of the horror genre that anticipating the arrival of the monster can be more terrifying than the beast's appearance.
But the uncertainty driving the anxiety novel, the book's ultimate source of terror, can't help but leave open the possibility that things might not be as bad as they seem.
Nothing left to do but camp: Prince Amponsah, left, and Mackenzie Davis in the HBO Max television adaptation of the post-apocalyptic novel 'Station Eleven.'
In 'Leave the World Behind,' there is no uncertainty. Because if the bombs are already in the air, the electrical grid is already down for the final time, the life-destroying echoes of
the noise
are already in your body, there is no future that isn't mass slaughter. As if to put a fine point on the guarantee of imminent death, the futility of resistance,
Alam
bores an unnoticed tick into Archie's ankle long before the boy is dying from noise-sickness.
Why does
Alam's
crushing story captivate me? Why am I thrilled by the promise that we're on the edge of extinction?
I think the book delights by allowing us to revel in the pleasures of giving up. Quit your job, break dinner plans, stop exercising, leave the relationship. What joy there is in not having to do the thing we thought we had to do. The world is ending
and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it
.
In his essay 'On Giving Up,' the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes: 'We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation toward what is shameful and fearful.' However, Phillips argues, there is such a thing as 'a tyranny of completion, of finishing things, which can narrow our minds unduly.' The refusal to give up can be harmful, murderous. Phillips interprets 'Macbeth,' 'Lear,' and 'Othello' as tragic dramatizations of the tyranny of completion.
My earliest memory of the desire to give up ends with my mother rejecting it. I was nine or 10 years old and wanted to quit the school choir. Mom and I stood in the kitchen before breakfast. I don't remember why it felt so important to quit, but I was crying, shaking, desperate for the relief of not having to sing that afternoon.
Mom's response was sympathetic but stern: No. We don't quit things partway through. No negotiation. I felt like puking.
I have quit things, though. And I've loved it. Oh, the joy of leaving that troubled 10-year relationship! I imagine it's what Scrooge felt waking on Christmas morning, learning that he has another chance. I instantly recall the butterflies, the excitement of quitting what seemed like a life destined for permanent frustration. The breakup was terrible. I hated hurting her. The logistics of moving were complicated, and she trashed the house when she left the final time. But I don't feel the pain of those hurtful memories as intensely as I feel the pleasure of the memory of giving up.
Essayist, author and Wilfrid Laurier University professor James Cairns.
The incredible thing is that most of the time, people don't give up. They struggle, they overcome, they get by, they make do. Why don't people kill themselves, asks Camus at the start of 'The Myth of Sisyphus.' Life is absurd; what's the point of living? Notwithstanding its obviousness, Camus's conclusion is profound: the nature of the human condition is to keep going, to
not
give up. That doesn't mean we don't fantasize about quitting, maybe even about leaving the world behind.
It's the pleasure in the dream of quitting, not the politics of mass death, that I desire. In imagining the end of the world, I experience the release of countless other pressures. My own anxieties get transferred to the novel, where they disappear, if only for a fraction of a moment, in the blackout, the sound, the carnage of the plot. Research shows that watching horror movies can relieve psychological tension.
There are better apocalyptic novels than 'Leave the World Behind.' For portraying social collapse as gradual and incomplete, Butler's 'Parable of the Sower' and Emily St. John
Mandel's
'Station Eleven'
are doubtless more realistic depictions of how modern society falls apart.
The spirit of those books reminds me of
Andreas
Malm's
admonition to fight climate change no matter the chances of victory. In 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline,'
Malm
argues that even if we know for certain that the climate crisis cannot be stopped there remains a moral imperative — a species-defining need — to fight until our last breath. 'Better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively,' writes
Malm
. The words could've come from Lauren
Olamina's
mouth.
In Rice's 'Moon of the Crusted Snow,' once it's clear that widespread disaster has struck in 'the south' (the heartland of Canada, and, presumably, the world), Aileen, a community elder, says to her neighbour, Evan:
'In Crisis, on Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times'
James Cairns
226 pages
Wolsak and Wynn
$22.00
' What a silly word (apocalypse). I can tell you there's no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders anyway
... Our world isn't ending. It already ended. It ended when the
Zhaagnaash
(white man) came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the
Zhaagnaash
cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that's when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here ...
But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That's when our world ended again. And that wasn't the last time.'
Aileen is very likely right in assuming that the world will not end all at once. In 'Station Eleven,' 20 years after the pandemic killed 99.99 per cent of the human species, characters refer to themselves as living in the world after the end of the world. In the final pages of 'Prophet Song,' Paul Lynch writes that 'the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event.' Viewed in one light, the world will not end even if it does.
Of course, in a different light, one capable of simultaneously illuminating past, present, and future, the world will end,
is ending
. It's just a matter of time. In an essay about art's ability to alter experiences of time, Karl
Ove
Knausgård
writes: 'We see the changes in the clouds but not the changes in the mountains,' because the 'now' of human perception excludes geologic time. In reality, mountains are moving, just more slowly than rivers and rabbits. It's anyone's guess how life on Earth is eventually snuffed out for good. Fire? Ice? Alien invasion? In any case, the party won't last forever.
Butler and
Mandel's
realistic depictions of the gradual, uneven nature of collapse can make
Alam's
Big Bang version of the final crisis look foolish by comparison. But
Alam
is not wrong that one day it will all end in the passage of one second to the next. The light will be on, as it has been for millennia, and then, the light will go out.
Alam's
innovation is drawing that uniquely decisive moment from the (hopefully far-off) future and placing it in the now. Lights out tomorrow or next week.
Whereas Butler, Mandel and Rice's main characters brim with insights about societal change and social justice, Alam's self-absorbed middle-class cast lusts over money and searches for Coca-Cola. Yet while stories of reproducing lives and communities in the aftermath of civilizational collapse are inspiring, admirable and satisfying, they're also exhausting, and not only because there are fires to build, continents to trudge across and gangs of murderous thieves to avoid. There's also the intense, inescapable fear on every page that survival won't work out. Nothing is guaranteed. By contrast, Alam's book guarantees the sudden and utter end of it all. There's catharsis in the swiftness and totality of such destruction.
Amid today's overlapping political, economic and ecological crises, art's cathartic power is needed more urgently than ever. Show us the world vanishing on the page, and we may more clearly see sustainable paths ahead. Release in us the pleasure of giving up, and we may find new strength to struggle on.
From 'In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times' by James Cairns. ©2025. Reproduced with the permission of Wolsak & Wynn, 2025.
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