Our recent stockpiling is nothing to what ‘preppers’ lay in store

This book could not have been published at a better time — nor, in a way, at a worse time. Better, because we are now living with the threat of disaster looming over us and society is being radically transformed; worse, because the apocalyptic scenarios Mark O’Connell writes about include such quaint, marginal topics as catastrophic climate change, nuclear devastation and the concern of ‘preppers’. These are the men who build bunkers in the countryside and fill them with enough tins of protein sludge to keep them going through whatever unspecified calamity brings about the end of the rule of law. There’s not a great deal here about a global pandemic.

That said, there doesn’t have to be. O’Connell is not so much interested in how society is going to collapse as in how some people are coping with the fear that it will. And there are a lot of frightened people out there — not only of the end of days but of ‘the poor, the dark-skinned, the feminine, the other’. ‘Cringing’ is the word the author uses to describe this fear. The people most worried about this are reasonably well off, rural white men who like their wives to do as they’re told; but, O’Connell adds, ‘their sense of the fragility of the systems by which we live is, in the end, hard to dismiss as entirely paranoid, entirely illogical’.

The author comes across some repellent and pathetic specimens as he noses around the prepper community, both online and in real life. The images used to demonstrate a world WROL (Without Rule of Law) on a website called The Prepper Journal are those of young black men rioting in urban districts.