Some of the weirdest and best apocalyptic fiction going from a twisty narrative master
In the ever-growing canon of apocalyptic fiction, Ron Currie, Jr. may be the king of a very weird domain. His first book, God is Dead, chronicled the trials and travails of a world in which, well, God dies, and things don’t go so well after. In Everything Matters!, Currie’s latest novel, his characters become essential in planet Earth’s survival.

John “Junior” Thibodeaux is born to a young Maine couple sometime in the 1970s. His father is a hard-working Vietnam vet, his mother a gentle and anxious small-town girl, his brother a potential troublemaker with the best swing since Babe Ruth. We know all of this because a chorus of unnamed narrators tells us the details of Junior’s life by speaking directly to him and to us. The voices explain the mysteries of Junior’s family’s life (“Your mother believes your father lost his fingers to shrapnel from a fragmentary grenade… But this is what actually happened,” they say, going on to explain his dad was mutilated by an irate Vietnamese prostitute), but they also confide a much bigger secret: an asteroid is poised to hit the Earth, obliterating all life. Junior alone knows the date and time of the cataclysmic event and this knowledge is his cross to bear.

Just as we’ve gotten used to the idea that Junior is not only a conscious and sentient infant, informed of more sorrowful information about the world and its inhabitants than the baby Jesus himself, Currie switches up on us again. Each character in turn begins to narrate subsequent chunks of story, complicating Junior’s motivations and decisions as he tries to figure out how to make sense of life when annihilation looms.

A less assured writer could make a muddle of such a twisted and twisty story. But Currie’s comic timing and dramatic sensibility are as spot-on as the best action flick director’s — right through the big finish.