It is not too difficult to understand why apocalypse lit has enjoyed such a surge in popularity in recent years. Before you even get to vampire plagues and dark angel rebellions, the combination of earthly troubles from high oil prices and dangerous flu variants to geo-political instability and food shortages offer writers (and indeed film-makers) a rich source of disasters on which to build their all-too-credible stories.
Most of the literature I have come across focused on the cause and drama of the crisis (Last Light, The Passage, or the immediate battle for survival (The Things That Keep Us Here) and have done so convincingly.
What makes James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand novels (The Witches of Hebron is the second in the series) different, is that they pick up where these stories leave off, when man is struggling to rebuild the society he has just destroyed.
In this case we are in the town of Union Grove in upstate New York, where residents are living, more or less in isolation, in a largely agrarian society with a barter economy after the breakdown of the structures that once delivered food and oil through the local Wal-Mart and Exxon. It is some years after the breakdown of 20th Century society, the era of the automobile.
What makes Kunstler's books so fascinating is that he attempts to answer the question of what sort of society should the survivors build - something modelled on what has been lost or something more elemental and primitive. In doing so the author - who has written non-fiction work about the converging crises of the 21st Century - provides himself the perfect platfom to reflect on current human excesses.
The people of Union Grove react in very different ways to their changed circumstances. Many simply cannot cope in a new harsh environment in which most of the comforts they once took for granted - electric heat and light, automobiles, television, anti-biotics - are gone. We learn that there have been many suicides.
Others adjust more easily, finding peace and harmony in a more simple and localised life, even if it is much harder and hand to mouth.
The central character in the novels is a former Boston marketing executive, Robert Earl, who now makes his living as a carpenter, trading his goods for food, medical treatment and the other necessities of life. At the outset of the first novel, Earl witnesses the murder of a young man at the hands of the thugs of Wayne Karp, a thug whose supply business operates at the black end of the barter market.
The murder unsettles what has passed for peace in Union Grove, exposing a lack of ability to enforce any sort of law and order in the new society, a vacuum which the law of the jungle threatens to fill.
Earl and his friend Loren Holder, a congregationalist minister who has lost his faith, are forced to confront their town's reality and begin to look at ways to restore some sort of authority that can provide the townsfolk with the security they need.
As this process starts the unsteady equilibrium of the town is further disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious religious sect, which sets up camp in the abandoned High School. Led by the charismatic Brother Job, the New Faith Brotherhood rapidly becomes an alternative source of authority in the town, ready to match the new structures being put in place by Holder and Earl in the person of magistrate Stephen Bullock, a major local landowner.
The two stories - World Made by Hand and the sequel The Witches of Hebron - largely deal with the community's attempts to both define and rebuild some semblance of the civilisation they have lost, and in particular how they settle the ancient (but also very American) question of how the individual relates to the group, the private to the public.
They also have distinctive and colourful storylines of their own. The future these stories depict is violent and tough but not without hope or charm - actually perhaps not so very different from our own. They are clearly intended as a warning to the human race to mend the error of its way before it is too late, if it is not too late already.
They are thoughtful and worthy additions to the apocalpypse canon and I hope for more from Kunstler
