You have to love a book about the end of the world in which the first two references are to Saul Bellow’s Herzog and the HBO series The White Lotus, a high/low combo that preps us for authorial omniscience. In the next few paragraphs we get Marc Maron, Sally Rooney and Frank Kermode. Buckle up, kids, a cultural whirlwind is coming! The day of judgment is at hand, and the all-knowing Dorian Lynskey, who seems to have doomscrolled through every card catalogue on the planet, is just the person to provide live commentary. A capacious cultural history of ‘apocalyptic angst’, his Everything Must Go will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out.

In the mid-20th century it became clear that collective incineration and extinction could come at any time

For a catalogue of catastrophe from Aids to zombies, it’s tidy and well organised, like a corpse laid out by a fussy mortician. Lynskey divides disaster into compartments: impact (comets and asteroids), the Bomb, machines, civilisational collapse, pandemic and climate – and that’s leaving aside God, who scarred us forever with the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelation, which, as Lynskey puts, it ‘gives humanity’s story a theatrical finale’. The Rapture will come – ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end’ – but in this age of polycrisis you can choose your poison.

For each dismal category Lynskey provides a brief history which winds all the way to the parlous present. His principal focus is on books, fictional and otherwise, but he also considers films, pop songs, comedy routines, poems and the pronouncements of politicians, pollsters and activist organisations. In other words, he’s taking on the culture at large, the stories we’re told, the stories we tell ourselves. ‘On one level,’ he says, ‘this is a history of fear.’ Narrowing the scope somewhat, he concentrates on the past two centuries, mostly in Europe and North America, beginning in 1816, ‘the year without a summer’ (caused by the mushroom cloud of ash spewed by Mount Tambora in the largest volcanic eruption ever).

Lynskey quotes so widely that at times the book resembles a megadeath miscellany. One of the perverse pleasures of reading about how humanity deals with calamity is the comically grim vocabulary, some of which was new to me: omnicide, promortalism, Weltuntergangsroman. There are a couple of handy phrases: unaligned AI (‘if AI is not aligned with human values, then it is considered “unaligned” or “unfriendly”’) and its potential consequence, knowledge-enabled mass destruction. How have I come this far without considering the distinction between catastrophic risk and existential risk? Hint: the latter is worse.

Or is it? Bellow is the first novelist Lynskey quotes on the subject of our perverse love of apocalypse but he’s not the last. Here’s a Don DeLillo character arguing that the news has displaced the novel:

This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel… We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.

And here’s Kurt Vonnegut: ‘Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.’ Made-up stories about total annihilation are thrilling, and yet we can’t seem to engage with the reality of an encroaching doom.

In her 1965 essay on sci-fi films ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ (a touchstone for Lynskey), Susan Sontag argues that part of our viewing pleasure ‘comes from the sense in which these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent’. She writes about the ‘peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess’, but at the same time acknowledges the enduring effect of the Bomb. In the middle of the 20th century it became clear that from then to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life not only under the threat of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically – collective incineration and extinction, which could come at any time, virtually without warning. It was Sontag who pointed out that the title ‘Apocalypse Now’ was wishful thinking. What we’re living with is ‘Apocalypse From Now On’.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Lynskey locates the birthplace of ‘secular eschatology’ on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Byron, in 1816, wrote ‘Darkness’, his singularly grim, godless account of the end of the world, and his friend Mary Shelley started Frankenstein, that inexhaustible treasure trove of mad scientist and monster tropes. Ten years later, Shelley published The Last Man, possibly the earliest example of dystopian fiction, in which plague ravages the globe and leaves a solitary survivor languishing amid the ruins of Rome. The novel was ridiculed by contemporary critics, then forgotten; recently it has been resurrected, thanks to Covid and the climate crisis. Lynskey dutifully reads it, and concedes it is ‘overlong and overwritten’, so we don’t have to.

Halley’s Comet streaked across the heavens in 1835, and Biela’s Comet in 1839, which inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write what Lynskey considers the first example of ‘impact fiction’, a short story in which a ‘celestial visitant’ smashes into Earth: ‘Thus ended all’. Luckily scientists put the chance of an ‘extinction-level’ impact from either an asteroid or a comet in any given year at less than 1 in 15 billion.

Among the many contributors to the impact genre is the ‘grandmaster’ H.G. Wells, with a short story called ‘The Star’. Lynskey’s brief biographical sketch of Wells is crisp and informative (who knew that he coined the phrase ‘second world war’?) and points accurately to his enviable literary qualities and the secret of his great success: his tales ‘drop a single incredible development – a Martian invasion, genetic experiments, an invisibility compound – into an otherwise familiar, late-Victorian world’.

Some of the prominent figures in Everything Must Go are as well known as Wells and Sontag. Many others, such as the astonishingly prolific and versatile Philip Wylie, have slipped into obscurity. Wylie, possessed of ‘a pungently cynical opinion of human nature’, mined each and every lode of disaster fiction and fancied himself a high-minded eschatologist – unlike the common run of sci-fi writers who peddle ‘a piddling phantasmagoria of wanton nonsense’. His grimmest novel was his last: The End of the Dream, published posthumously in 1969. The apocalypse this time is environmental, brought on by toxic waste and fossil-fuel extraction.

For a catalogue of catastrophe from Aids to zombies, the book is as tidy as a corpse laid out by a fussy mortician

Ten years ago Stephen Hawking declared: ‘I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pointed out that computers are ‘like Old Testament gods. Lots of rules, and no mercy’. Of all the looming terminal crises, AI is to me the most unnerving, partly because we don’t even know how the machines might go about killing us off, whether accidentally or on purpose. Or perhaps they’ll decide, as in The Matrix, to turn us into slaves.

Part of what makes Lynskey’s litany of doom enjoyable is his knack for evocative description. Nevil Shute, the author of On the Beach, has ‘a face like a disappointed bloodhound’. The verbless ‘cauterised sentences’ in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – ‘the logical terminus of the catastrophe novel’– are ‘as blunt as stumps’.

Lynskey zips through his tales of end-time havoc with a brisk, humorous stride, classifying, summarising and judging with the relentless efficiency of a hyper-sophisticated AI chatbot. He dispenses with most of the works he cites in a sentence or two. Very few are accorded more than a few pages – which is good. If the end is nigh, we want it to come quickly, right?

That said, Everything Must Go is too long. Five hundred pages of death and destruction has a numbing effect. Even worse than loving armageddon is indifference to omnicide. It occurred to me more than once that Lynskey needed a finer intake filter. Not every end-time tale is worth a mention.

Perhaps the only allusion to the apocalypse that he fails to cite is Elvis Costello’s song ‘Waiting for the End of the World’, with its doomy drumbeat and that priceless line: ‘Dear Lord, I sincerely hope You’re coming / ’Cause You really started something.’ I guess Lynskey, however brilliant, isn’t all-knowing after all. Oh, well… we’ll live.