Apocalypse Then: Stories

by Rick DeMarinis

Overview

Despite the world’s insecurities, the most common drama of all is not of apocalypse now, but of apocalypse deferred; the pain of living is having to wait it out. In Apocalypse Then, DeMarinis’s characters try alcohol, they try travel, and (most of all) they try off-limits love. They find themselves in harm’s way, or put themselves there—but in life, as the title story states, "sometimes the worst doesn’t happen."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609801656
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	01/04/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rick DeMarinis was the highly acclaimed author of ten novels, including The Year of the Zinc Penny, a New York Times Notable book, and six short story col­lections, including Apocalypse Then and Borrowed Hearts. In 1990, he received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Each year, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, awards a short story prize in his name. Rick passed away on June 12, 2019.

Editorial Reviews

A workmanlike collection (his fifth, after Borrowed Hearts, 1999) from DeMarinis, author of eight novels. The volume has three sections, the first and strongest consisting of seven takes on one man. In 1962, Moss is in college on the GI bill, trying to make his depressed wife Corliss happy and waiting for work with a Seattle defense contractor. When he and two buddies break into the physics lab at night to finish an experiment, they're radiated by high-velocity neutrons from an accelerator. Years later, Moss concludes that "Sometimes the worst doesn't happen." In "The Bear Itself," Moss and Astrid, his buddy Roddy's wife, save another friend from drowning. Roddy screams at Astrid, "Will you please put on some clothes, you goddamned whore!" With typical DeMarinis pithiness, Moss observes, "If a handful of words can end a marriage, Roddy had found them." "The Missile Gypsies" finds Moss, Corliss, and their baby son, Teller, transferred to North Dakota, where Moss collects data on the Minuteman missiles and betrays Corliss. In "Structure," Moss is desperate because Corliss has left him and he fears he has prostate cancer. He has another affair and loses his job. "Freaks" is the darkest, most conclusive story. Just as the now-13-year-old Teller is called a "freak" by cheerleaders, Moss develops weird symptoms (double vision, impotence, lactating breasts). He has successful brain surgery, recovers, reconnects with his son. Less satisfying as a unit, the second section offers nine stories about men who are dead either through electrocution ("Handyman"), heart attack "atop the bimbo" ("The Life and Times of a Forty-nine-Pound Man"), a vicious animal on the desert ("Bete Noire"), therepercussions of going wild on an airplane ("Desperado"), or from beating a woman to death ("The Horse Dealer's Lovers"). The last section-four rough-hewn coming-of-agers set in the '40s and '50s-could as well have been left out. And uneven and mismatched gathering. The best here remind us of the author's crisp mastery of the form.

Kirkus Reviews

The power of DeMarinis' deliciously disconcerting short stories is generated by his card-shark ability to transform the realistic into the bizarre. Loaded with startlingly vivid details, unusually skewed psychological insights, and ravishingly poetic apocalyptic intimations, DeMarinis' cunning, cuttingly funny short stories track the psychic damage done by war and the chilling shadow of nuclear weapons even as they celebrate our rising, however unsteadily, from the ashes.” –Donna Seaman, American Library Association


“However similar the existential suffering of his characters, DeMarinis expertly probes the contours of their condition.You simply can't move your eyes from the page.” –Mark Smirnoff, New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher