John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey’s The Apocalypse Triptych is a trilogy of short-story collections, each one set at a different stage of the end of the world. In the second book in the series, The End is Now, we take you to Doomsday already in progress. Twenty stories telling all the different ways that everything is coming to an end.
The quarantine measures have failed, the asteroids are leveling Earth’s cities as we speak, the zombie horde is just shambling into view, and the aliens have already started shooting. The apocalypse is in full swing. Let’s do this.
I was a little worried before reading the first book that the plan to have authors submit stories in three parts, one for each book in the trilogy, might end up a little gimmicky. Fortunately for the most part the authors were able to submit works that could stand on their own, while at the same time be open for more chapters. This actually made many of the stories in the second book even better, since all of the heavy lifting of character introduction and exposition had been taken care of in the first installment.
David Wellington’s story “Agent Isolated” is a terrifying little segment of the middle of a zombie epidemic, where even the CDC main character from the previous story “Agent Unknown” is having to fact the fact that the treatment for the disease is much much worse than the disease itself. “Fruiting Bodies” by Seanan McGuire shows the progression of “the first fungal apex predator” as it slowly eats the world alive now that it’s escaped from lab, and Sarah Langan’s “Black Monday” has the same disaster setting (asteroids) near the same fallout shelter as her story in the first book, but with different characters having to face an entirely new doomsday scenario.
I think “The Sixth Day of Deer Camp” (sequel to Scott Sigler’s “The Fifth Day of Deer Camp”, natch) would have worked better as two chapters in the same book; the ending of the second story hits much harder, and begs for the next installment, whereas the first story seemed to be entirely about setting the scene and a role call for the characters. Same for “Angels of the Apocalypse”, although the first chapter would need to be a lot shorter, since it felt way too overloaded on all the exposition needed for the second chapter. And “Herd Immunity” by Tananarive Due felt so far removed from the struggles of the main character in “Removal Order” that they might as well have been completely unconnected stories.
“Goodnight Stars” was a nice surprise, since Annie Bellet wrapped up the previous story “Goodnight Moon” so well, I hadn’t even considered the idea that there was anything more to tell. And I’m extremely glad that Ben H. Winters had already planned to write “Bring Them Down” for this book, since the story “BRING HER TO ME” had such a dreamlike quality to it – a voluntary apocalypse on another planet – that I had to find out where the heck he was going with it. Looking forward to the third installment on that one. Also looking forward to more after “To Wrestle Not Against Flesh and Blood”, since we still don’t know if an alien invasion, a government false flag, or a combination of both.
Probably the only disappointment was “Dancing With Batgirl in the Lad of Nod”, but that’s only because Will McIntosh’s contribution to the first book was the best in the collection, so uplifting and heartbreakingly tragic, while this one was just more tragedy. I think the high water mark for The End is Now was “Dear John”, by Robin Wasserman. The doomsday cult from “The Balm and the Wound” has survived the global tragedy (…whatever it actually turned out to be), and the story is a series of letters one of the survivors writes on toilet paper, each letter bitter and cutting and deeply, deeply angry, as she says a cathartic goodbye to all of the jerks she had the misfortune to date before the world ended and who (she hopes) died in the various creative ways she thinks they deserve. It’s hard to read and brutal, but also hilarious in a very dark sort of way, and the reader gets to watch as she works through things she hasn’t wanted to dwell on, about dating someone just to keep from being alone, and surviving just to say you survived.
The stories above and the rest in the collection are all engrossing and disturbing, and all more or less focusing on not just what’s happening, but who it’s happening to and how they react. How would the average human deal with the worst thing they can imagine suddenly coming true? Form an army of vigilantes? Eat drink and be merry? Face every horrible thing you’ve done? Or just run and keep on running until you’ve found the only other person on the planet who matters, or you run out of places to run? It’s not a collection for the faint of heart; it doesn’t even have the pre-apocalypse moments of happiness that the stories in the previous collection had. But it’s certainly made me interested to read the aftermath stories when the third book in the trilogy comes out later this year.