Everything Must Go! by Dorian Lynskey

Everything Must Go! The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

By Dorian Lynskey

Pantheon Books 2025

As Dorian Lynskey points out at the onset of his jam-packed, utterly absorbing new book Everything Must Go! The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “the end of the world” typically means “the end of humanity’s role as rulers of the planet.” It obviously doesn’t mean the end of the actual planet; absent some incredibly unlikely alien Death Star attack, the only thing that could destroy the actual planet is the thing that absolutely will: Earth will be consumed to cinders when the sun expands into a red giant in a few billion years.

But the end of humanity’s reign could come about in a few different ways, Lynskey notes. A nearby star could go supernova, unleashing a wave of deadly radiation that would eventually sweep through this solar system and sterilize it. A city-sized asteroid could strike the planet at supersonic speed, kicking up a planetary cloud cover that would starve the world. One of the many massive coronal discharges fired off from the sun could strike us full-on, overwhelming the magnetic field and frying the power grids on which three-fourths of humans rely. One – or more – of the planet’s currently-dormant supervolcanoes could erupt, choking the atmosphere and shutting down most food supply chains.

Lynskey writes a bit about God, and a bit about the chance of an asteroid hit, but he concentrates much more of his attention on a handful of more localized threats: rogue AI, rampaging pandemics, uncontrolled climate change, and that old standby of apocalyptic imaginings, atomic power. Readers have seen similar books, from Mike Pearl’s The Day It Finally Happens to Cody Cassidy’s How To Survive History to Taras Young’s odd, beguiling Apocalypse Ready. And although Lynskey is as spirited and interesting a writer as any of these, the real distinction of his book is as good for the reader as it must have been bad for the author: he appears to have read and watched literally every single apocalypse-related book, article, movie, or TV show ever made, and in his own book he manages to name-check and thumbnail-review virtually all of it. It’s a twisted but genuinely staggering achievement, something that will have readers chasing down references for the rest of the year.

He's always entertaining about those references, quotable even when controversial. He refers to Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road as “the definitive rebuke to survivalist heroics, and the logical terminus of the catastrophe novel,” for instance, and he briefly discusses everything from The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells to its many film adaptations to both the book and movie of The Andromeda Strain to George Romero’s iconic 1968 Night of the Living Dead to the now-unknown 1901 novel The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel, which he calls “an exceptionally deranged last-man story which cries out for psychotherapists as well as readers.”

Lynskey often works pointed insights into his summaries of all these things, as when he’s discussing Alfonso Cuaron’s movie adaptation of PD James’s 1992 Children of Men: “The truth is that most of us would not be rugged survivalist supermen like Mad Max but more like the shuffling compromised zombie citizens of Children of Men,” he writes, before weirdly adding, “Whatever.”

That “Whatever” isn’t an isolated thing. Its equivalents crop up throughout the book, regularly and strangely undermining the whole text. What is that “Whatever” doing in that quoted passage, exactly? Does the author believe his claim, or doesn’t he? If he doesn’t, why make it? And if he does, why himself dismiss it?

Likewise his description of the 14th century’s infamous Black Death and its aftermath. Here again the points and their own refutations seem to come hand-in-hand:

Those left behind were all the more confused because it was not the end of the world and there had been no great transformation to give purpose to their suffering. The authority of the church, glutted by donations even as priests deserted their flocks, was permanently damaged. The sense of injustice and institutional failure inaugurated an era of peasants’ revolts and millenarian radicalism, as people sought their own new beginnings. Surely an experience so vast, horrendous, and inexplicable, couldn’t mean nothing?

So is Lynskey saying all these massive transformations weren’t actually massive, or weren’t actually transformations, or that the people who survived the Black Death somehow didn’t notice them? You read a passage so promptly folding in on itself, and you can practically hear the unspoken “Whatever.”

Perhaps naturally, the book’s narrative strands about pandemics are the most emotionally powerful, and the same warning about pandemics is sounded over and over. Lynskey cites Laurie Garrett’s now-famous 2019 Foreign Affairs article “The World Knows an Apocalyptic Pandemic is Coming,” for example. “The virus that emerged from Wuhan three months later stopped the world and killed more than seven million people, was not Garrett’s superflu,” he writes. “More often than not, it is the thing we don’t see coming.” This echoes a quote from George Stewart’s 1949 novel Earth Abides, “The trouble you’re expecting never happens; it’s always something that sneaks up the other way.” Readers making their way through Everything Must Go will naturally be thinking of one or more of the many projected catastrophes that are mentioned in the news (and on social media), and they’ll each have to deal with this persistent suggestion that they won’t see it coming.

“While I am in no position to assure you that climate change, nuclear war, pandemics or unfriendly AI definitely won’t finish us off,” Lynskey writes. “I can say that wallowing in doom won’t improve matters and might even amount to collaboration.” An odd thing for this author of this particular book to write, but it’s certainly better than “Whatever.”

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News