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Our newest review at TQC is Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. It’s a pre-post-apocalypse novel:
Ron Currie, Jr.’s second book, Everything Matters!, is an appropriate follow-up to his award-winning story collection God Is Dead. While the latter collects nine stories about a world fallen into chaos in the wake of God’s sudden death, the former is essentially pre-apocalyptic in nature. Rather than expanding from some disastrous origin point, the world of Everything Matters! contracts into a fiery and inevitable end, a conclusion punctuated by the Destroyer of Worlds, a giant comet that appears in the book’s final pages, obliterating the Earth and all of humankind. Far from spoiling the plot, foreknowledge of this ending operates within the novel as a kind of literary mechanism; it is not only readers of the novel who know that the end of the world is near but also the main character, and this awareness affects his every action.
This is Currie’s second book, and he seems to be creating a sort of “apocalypse-literature” niche for himself, as this follow his lauded short story collection God Is Dead.
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