“After the Apocalypse”: The end of the world, without heroes

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

The post-apocalyptic adventure story, in the American imagination, at least, is a wish disguised as a fear. Feigning horror at the notion of civilization razed to its foundations, we can indulge in the fantasy of remaking it from the ground up. Finally, we'll get it right because we Americans -- despite not knowing about stuff like, say, Libya -- abound in native common sense and gumption. And that's all we really need, right?

"After the Apocalypse," a new short story collection by Maureen McHugh, amounts to a merciless dismantling of this delusion. The first story, "The Naturalist," is a zombie yarn (the only one in the book), set in the ruins of Cleveland, a fenced-off no-man's land where convicts are impounded in the unspoken hope that the zombies will finish them off -- or vice versa. Whittaker, the inevitable self-appointed leader of the cons, likes to make speeches about "how they were all more free here in the preserve than they'd ever been in a society that had no place for them, about how there used to be spaces for men with big appetites like the Wild West and Alaska -- and how all that was gone now."

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“After the Apocalypse”: The end of the world, without heroes