This Is the Way the World Ends

✍ Scribed by Morrow, James

• Book ID: 107579512
• Publisher: Gateway
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 185 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

When tombstone engraver George Paxman is offered a bargain, he doesn't hesitate. His beloved daughter gets an otherwise unaffordable survival suit to protect her from radioactive fall-out and all George has to do is sign a document admitting that, as a passive citizen who did nothing to stop it, he has a degree of guilt for any nuclear war that breaks out. George signs on the dotted line. And then the unthinkable happens.

The world and everyone in it (survival suit or not) is destroyed in a nuclear Armageddon - except for George and five others who must now face prosecution from the great mass of humanity who will now never be born. And George Paxman stands accused in the name of all the people who stood by and never raised a finger to stop the horror of nuclear war. . .

From Library Journal

Near the end of Morrow's painful novel of nuclear holocaust six survivors representing mankind are tried for their complicity in the war. Denouncing them, an alien prosecutor says, ''It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed . . . . the greatest of these is moral outrage.'' That seems to be the key to a curiously contrived saga of nuclear nightmare. As scenes of family life are followed by explicit scenes of nuclear attack, as obscene theories of nuclear tactics are explained, the only possible reaction is moral outrage. Unfortunately, an overabundance of fantastic elementsthe prophecies of Nostradamus, giant prehistoric birds, a flying tailor shop, a mysterious alien race called the unadmittedis never quite joined into a coherent whole. In the ensuing confusion, the novel loses much of its power. Not recommended. Beth Ann Mills, New Rochelle P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Begins where Dr Strangelove ends... a gorgeously crafted and insanely funny tale about mortal and ghostly matters... deals seriously and intelligently with large issues in strangely captivating modes. --Philadelphia Inquirer