His was not the only '80s novel set after Earth's destruction: Other notable examples included Denis Johnson's "Fiskadoro," a mythic tale in which shards of pop culture are worshipped as religion, and Carolyn See's "Golden Days," in which nuclear war is, for some laid-back Angelenos, good news.
Now, as then, the end of the world allows for a lot of powerful writing in a range of styles.
McCarthy's "The Road" is the bleakest of the bunch, written in raw, bitten-off utterances.
"By dusk the day following they were at the city. The long concrete sweeps of the interstate like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk. He carried the revolver in his belt at the front and wore his parka unzipped. The mummied dead everywhere.... like latterday bogfolk."
By contrast, James' "Children of Men" reaches Keatsian notes only hinted at by the film. "The children's playgrounds in our parks have been dismantled.... Now they have finally gone and the asphalt playgrounds have been grassed over or sewn with flowers like small mass graves. The toys have all been burnt, except for the dolls, which have become for some half-demented women a substitute for children."
Adrian's protagonist in "The Children's Hospital" wonders if what she is seeing is real: "They were more likely experiencing some cruel experiment -- black out the windows and blow in some aerosolized LSD and get Phyllis Diller to hide somewhere with a microphone and claim to be a sweet, creepy angel -- than the end of the world."
The roots of these doomsday novels predate America's founding, according to Thomas Schaub, a University of Wisconsin professor who edits the journal Contemporary Literature.
These books, he said, resemble the jeremiads that Puritan ministers issued in the 17th century to awe-stricken audiences. "They preached the day of doom as a way of bringing the flock back to our original mission. 'The wrath of God is upon us, we have forgotten what America was supposed to be.' That's a fairly consistent dynamic in American history."
What's new, he said, is an increasing pace of change as well as an explosion of ways to bring that change to us. "The hyperawareness delivered by the media provides a sense of implosion, an immediacy, a sense of imminence."
This has led the latest wave of apocalyptic writing to have a different tone than the work of a generation or so earlier.
