A TIDY ARMAGEDDON

A novel in the vein of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, showcasing the devastating scale of mass consumption while delivering a suspenseful and action-rich tale of human connection, loss, and resilience

The world is utterly transformed: every product of human creation has been organized by an unknown hand into a vast grid of nine-story blocks, each comprised of a single item type: watering cans, lighthouses, fake Christmas trees, helicopters, plastic spoons, and everything else Earth's culture and technology have ever produced, stacked in homogenous towers and separated by a maze of passageways.

Navigating this depopulated environment, a small contingent of diverse soldiers tries to make sense of this enigmatic apocalypse while desperately searching for survivors. They are led by Elsie Sharpcot, a Cree woman who has endured the military's rampant racism and misogyny, and Dorian Wakely, her PTSD-afflicted second-in-command. Both veterans of the war in Afghanistan, they lead a group of army misfits while they all struggle — against the elements and each other — to survive.

Passing with fear and wonder through this museum of human achievement, provisioning themselves from its resources, the group races to outrun the approaching winter and find a home.

BH Panhuyzen, an author of two previous novels and a collection of stories, lives in Toronto with three humans, a dog, and a cat, plus works as an independent software developer. BH fears that all this personal recycling, squishing every cereal box and milk carton, might not be working.