IN one, a thick layer of ash covers everything as a nameless man and his son push their cart through a shattered land of absolute silence and darkness without end.
In another, the world inexplicably floods, sending a watertight hospital full of sleep-deprived doctors and their young patients bobbing on the waves like a new Noah's Ark.
And in a third, the Manhattan Company dispatches a team of rogues from a mysteriously devastated Northeast to settle an untouched part of tidewater Virginia inhabited by a 21st century Pocahontas.
They're all recent or upcoming novels with literary heft: Cormac McCarthy's solemn and elegiac "The Road," Chris Adrian's ironic-religious "The Children's Hospital" and Matthew Sharpe's black-humorous "Jamestown," respectively.
It's not just Mel Gibson, Feral House and the "Left Behind" books anymore. Long the province of the paranoid left and Christian right, apocalypse has moved indoors, and it's going highbrow. Literary novels with end-of-the-world settings -- these books and others by respected writers such as Daniel Alarcon, Michael Tolkin, David Mitchell and Carolyn See -- are surging at the same time as serious filmmakers engage a subject most often left to B movies.
Based on P.D. James' 1992 novel, Alfonso Cuaron's well-received 2006 film "Children of Men" shows a world in which human fertility has died out and fascism reigns. Over the next year, Hollywood will release a slew of "class" films involving environmental destruction, among them M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" and James Cameron's "Avatar," in which the beleaguered planet Earth turns on its inhabitants.
The notion of apocalypse -- the word is from the Greek for "the lifting of the veil" -- has been with us, in various forms, for a long time. But it's still worth asking: What does it mean that the dream life of the richest, most scientifically advanced nation in history is troubled by nightmares of the end?
The simple answer is that the attacks of 9/11 and the Iraq war have brought a sense of unease and vulnerability to both artists and audiences. Growing worries about global warming and the greater visibility of the Christian right -- Protestant fundamentalists, for whom the apocalypse is not metaphor, are thought to have swung the last two presidential elections -- have brought the end of the world in from the shadows.
