This Is the Way the World Ends

James Morrow

There's a pretty good premise here. Nostradamus is visited by a lad whose mother is being seen in the doctors' office downstairs just as Nostro is working on a new invention to help him spread the word a bit more. To explain what they boy's seeing, he tells the boy the story of the end of the world. The end of the world involves a whole lot of nuclear missiles, a race called the unadmitted, and a gravestone carver from New England.

I think Morrow was going for comedy here; there are certainly a few amusing passages. The problem is that the comedy so often gets subsumed under Morrow's anti-nuclear message, which is delivered with all the subtlety of a Mack truck hitting a kid on a bicycle at full speed, that any humor value is pretty quickly lost. The book comes out sounding, not surprisingly, like a whole lot of other anti-nuclear-war material (I kept thinking of it as a failed attempt at a cross between Slaughterhouse Five and Dr. Strangelove, and lamenting that Morrow hadn't chosen more worthy anti-nuclear fare to base his screed on; imagine a combination of, say, On the Beach and Threads) that's overbearing and has little value outside delivering its message.

Still, there are times when it's readable, and it does contain a thread of amusement, so it doesn't fall to the bottom of the ratings basement.