One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

by Lucy Corin

Lucy Corin’s dazzling new collection is powered by one hundred apocalypses: a series of short stories, many only a few lines, that illuminate moments of vexation and crisis, revelations and revolutions. An apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but what it exposes is the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate.

Three longer stories are equally visionary: in "Eyes of Dogs," a soldier returns from war and encounters a witch who may in fact be his mother; "Madmen" describes an America where children who reach adolescence choose the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; in "Godzilla versus the Smog Monster,” a teenager is flustered by his older, wilder neighbor while California burns on the other side of the continent.

At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses makes manifest the troubled conscience of an uneasy time

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction, LGBT, Dystopia, Poetry, Queer

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 14, 2013

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Death, madness, sex, and explosions - just a few of the apocalyptic treasures in Lucy Corin's One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. In this artfully-bound book she includes three short stories and 100 pieces in flash fiction form. Of the three longer pieces "Madmen" stood out the most. It explores a society in which when girls get their periods, they adopt an insane person to stay with them for the rest of their lives. This piece highlights Corin at her best, when she nails the authentic and vulnerable voice of an anxious thirteen-year-old, all while driving home an important and non-didactic message about mental health in contemporary times.

Her 100 vignettes also carry a a more sporadic strength. While some move into the realm of hyper-intellectualism or self-awareness-turned-dramatic, for the most part they offer a slew of thoughtful themes ranging from the psychological repercussions of imminent death to our intrinsic desire for sheer connection when times get rough. Even though Corin may lack consistency in the quality of her writing in this piece, she still offers much wit, in the form of sometimes shocking and revelatory near-death moments.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Like any reasonable apocalypse, pulsing with intimacy and the anonymous."

Well I do love a good apocalypse treatment, and this is unique in the handling of the topic. It isn't really a story, but a set of a few longer stories and then a bunch (a hundred, I'm guessing) of smaller little blurb stories, flash fiction really, all in this universe of collapse and destruction. There are fun bits to enjoy and one in particular ("Questions in Significantly Smaller Font") sent me on a huge internet rabbit hole, it was more of a poem quoting entirely from the FAQ of the website raptureready.com... which seems to be a real thing, in fact I saw a church yesterday in the mountains of NC that had a "rapture ready" banner up. And hey, the church was empty, so you can decide what that means.

This book was previously published by McSweeney's so even though I have a review copy, I believe it to be final copy. Mea culpa if I should not be quoting from it.

"This is why we lived twitching, as if we'd ever sense what could help us." (from Vibrissae)

"Despite everything, after the apocalypse there are hardly any suicides, no matter what we've done or failed to do. I suppose our minds assure us we can handle it. I mean God only gives you... I mean God only lets you do what you can live with after the apocalypse. After the apocalypse, we're just living with ourselves."
(from Fertile Crescent)

[El]

My interest is piqued after this interview in The Rumpus.

[Darcy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucy Corin is an odd bird and I am so appreciative of that beautiful quality in her writing. There were times I did not know what end was up in the many worlds she created and I was grateful for the disturbance. She does not tell stories like anyone else I know. Strange and beautiful and heart wrenching and mind-bending. I was so happy to have stumbled upon this book merely for my fascination with apocalyptic stories. And congratulations McSweeney for publishing this stunning fare. Worth serious consideration.

[Professor Weasel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book left me a bit cold to be honest. I think I am maybe just not the target audience--it simply wasn't my cup of tea. I also might have had expectations that were way too high--the reviews I'd read were glowing, and I loved the title as well as the concept (or at least the idea of it... reading it was another story). So yeah--reading this book made me feel fuzzy and alienated. I was also really bothered by the story "Madmen" for reasons that I won't get into here, but to say the least, I would never, ever, ever want someone who is suffering from mental illness to read this story. Like... it is kind of offensive? Or maybe I am just too sensitive? But I thought it was gimmicky and icky, like a bad George Saunders knock-off. I respect this book's experimental nature, though. And there were a few of the short apocalypse flash pieces that I liked, though can't say there were any that I loved.

[Mirissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was completely lost on me. No clue what the point of any of it was.

[birdbassador · Rating 3 out of 5]

okay, so this is mostly my fault: i thought the conceit was gonna be a calvino invisible cities-style stories around one hundred different apocalypses, instead of short stories and vignettes that were extremely "mcsweeneys-coded" as the kids might say. i mean it wasn't not the eschatological calvino thing sometimes, but this just made my disappointment worse, if that makes sense.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the strength of Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster alone I'd read more Corin, but much of the rest had a Dickinson-ishly lyrical/enigmatic tang, only more impenetrable and cynical and without the sublimity. Some of the apocalypses make up the best English sudden fiction I've come across. As Louise Gluck blurbs, "Corin sounds like no one;" her prose is uncanny, in the way Freud used the word: fundamentally strange: it's uncanniness aestheticized somehow. Anxious, graceful, frustrated, violent, flippant, cracked-out at times, you're not sure what to do with it, maybe I should laugh, maybe I should reread that line, maybe I should just shut up and careen through and just listen. Flits between hyperintellectualism and pop colloquialism midsentence like DFW, only less inviting. And she's cold, there's the analytical coldness you get with Robbe-Grillet. The fact that I want to reach for these big names to compare/define her work says something, I think, but the point is, it moved me, I'm just not sure how, and I'll definitely attempt anything she writes in future, hoping for more of a balance between style (already masterful) and content/story (jury's out).

[Sarah Schantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, the actual book is a work of art; it looks and feels like something an artsy bookmaker would make (like a teacher I once had who did book binding and print making--she made these amazing books that were so much more than books but tiny little museums or curio cabinets, but I digress). Secondly, there are over a hundred short stories about the apocalypse--what could go wrong? Well, actually, a whole lot could go wrong, but it doesn't, and that is my point. The theme doesn't get tiresome, although I will admit to not having always read through the book in chronological order, but rather by the rules of bibliomancy, through the touch of divination--and I will probably continue to pick the book up, close my eyes, flip through pages and land where my gut says, "Stop," and then re-read whatever story has presented itself. The stories themselves are diverse, textured, and often quite unique. Furthermore, and finally, it was the perfect book to employ while teaching a creative writing workshop titled: Apocalyptic Summer (especially considering how male-dominated the authorship of such books are, although, this is changing).

[Kendall · Rating 1 out of 5]

This collection of short stories is like a handful of words thrown onto a page with no particular sense in how they fall. I'm obviously not on Lucy Corin's level because I couldn't get into nearly any of the apocalyptic stories. Maybe 6 of the stories in the book were intriguing, and perhaps this would be a good book to read with the intention of deeply thinking about the meaning of each story, but for me, who was looking for entertainment, this book was far too abstract for me to appreciate the complexities in the writing. Wouldn't recommend unless you were going to closely examine it in a upper-level creative writing course.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apocalypses come in sizes large and small in the title sequence of 100 vignettes and prose poems that never fail to move the reader. Included are also three other short stories/novelettes, my favorite of the strong bunch being "Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster," which gets huge bonus points for the title, but it's one of the most devastating and haunting pieces I've read this year.

[Leslie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel like Corin is someone who can come up with decent story ideas but has no idea what to do with them. None of these short stories ever feel like they make sense or come to a conclusion, they just stop. Definitely not worth the time to read unless you want to relive your college creative writing class and your classmates' never ending insanity.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked "Madmen", it was an interesting concept. The rest, not so much. Some of the stories were just random words thrown together with no sense at all. The occasional sentance stood out with some spectacular visuals, but on the whole, nonsensical. But maybe I just don't get this edgy, metaphorical style of writing.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this over a year ago and never wrote a review. This collection is so bizarre and beautiful, even frightening at times. It's one of the most unique short story collections I've read, containing longer pieces of fiction and tiny pieces of prose alike. Corin's voice is singular, and I feel I'd know her anywhere.

[Phoenix Scholz-Krishna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in bits and pieces (which is nice, considering the format) and finished it today. A very interesting voice, whose cadences and idiosyncratic sentences remind me of Tim Etchells (and that's a very good thing).

[staykind · Rating 4 out of 5]

original, entertaining and thought provoking essays.

[Steve Shilstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Select the apocalypse of your desire. It's in there along with the real one, whatever it may be.

[Michelle Leung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little pieces of strange speculative flash fiction about the apocalypse. “Madmen” stood out to me (a world where girls come of age, and pick a “mad” person from an asylum to nurture for the rest of their lives) - Very surreal, weird and terrifying, really.

[Alison]

Satisfying to move this to the DNF shelf. I liked the first half more or less, but the second half is all microfiction and I'm just not into it.

[Melanie Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered Lucy Corin when several years ago I was scrolling through the FC2 catalog, looking for some new treasure (based on title and description). Then, there it was: Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. How can you not love the title alone?! I bought it. I loved it. I taught it at an all-women's Catholic college. They hated it. I loved that.

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is quite a different kind of read. While Everyday Psychokillers had short stories within the novel, this new collection consists mostly of flash fiction pieces. The more I read, the more I felt that Corin's strength is in telling those short stories.

Read the full review at Grab the Lapels.

[n · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are moments in this book that felt utterly compelling & on point; but they were not, collectively, enough to save this collection of short stories for me. Too dream-like (not dreamy, per se) but dream-like in the way dreams are nonsensical, boring, repetitive, only interesting when they are yours.

Still, there might be some truth to this collection, especially compared to other literary apocalypses. Is this what a logical apocalyptic future is? Only fragments, banality among the weight of a crumbling world, normalcy in the madness of other people.

[keri. · Rating 3 out of 5]

at some point this book started feeling super in love with itself and its own twee cleverness, and stopped being interesting wrt its apocalyptic story telling. it saved itself in the end, and I'm glad I finished it, but I probably would've enjoyed it more if it was 10-15 more traditional short stories about a variety of world ending events, instead of a hundred paragraphs or one page items that mostly went nowhere at all. McSweeney's!! I WILL NEVER ESCAPE.

[Libby Hays · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only book I've ever read to insightfully encapsulate the bloated, swirling, hemorrhaging, compacted, impacted, pregnant, aborted, miasmic, naked, distended, deceitful and delicious world we really live in, at this present moment in the history of planet earth. Corin might be our only hope for salvation.

[Laurian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just too strange for my current mental state.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection as dazzling as the laser-cut hardback cover: a trio of short stories, followed by 100 versions of the end of the world. Lucy Corin gives us a work filled with ideas, humor, and a hundred dark hearts.

---
"Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster": "There's an old donkey who lives with a pony in a post-and-rail paddock with a little wooden shelter. When they pass the paddock, the donkey is lying in the snow, curled like a dog on a hearth, and the pony is standing over it. Gray donkey, white pony, dark rail fence, pale, pale sky."
---
"A Hundred Apocalypses"

"Library": "You can get away with almost anything by nodding and asking an honest question. People love it when you don't know something. That's something to contribute to society."

"Venn Diagram": "Her fear in the night was that her success made her like so many successful people she disdained, but she made a good case that she was exceptional. She thought people were only seeing the parts of her that were like other successful people, but the parts left over from that were actually the good parts. The parts left over for the successful people she knew were the bad parrts. That lemon in the middle, the shady part of the Venn diagram--what was that? That was success. After the apocalypse she was dead anyway, but her work remained. Survivors crowded around it. Everything was black, but it glowed white. They discarded the part that had been the lemon because one thing's for sure: everything had changed. They looked at what was left, and some of them wondered if this could be the new now. They remembered the stuff they'd always secretly loved or hated. One of them, a man, picked it up by the edge, lifted one crescent moon of it from the other, hooked it to his belt loop. This could be my ticket, he thought. Idiot."

"Body": "The father put ointment on her eyes and closed the lids. Next is a line about the father that I can't write. Next is a line about the mother. Next is a line about there and not there."

"Mindless": "When the globe that meant the world to me fell from my hands and burst, I left the room, and when my love, or whatever I meant by her, came into the room accidentally, she saw that the air conditioning was like those videos of rock bands in vacant fields, deserts, with their hats, rocky outcroppings of emotions, no one listening out there but the fans."

[Tadzio Koelb · Rating 3 out of 5]

From my review for the TLS:

Corin’s surreal, sci-fi tinged stories of alternate worlds rely for their effect on the non-specific. Where they occur, and when, what caused the apocalypses –even what an apocalypse is (some are sold from under raincoats, others crawl about or enter the body) – all remain carefully undefined. In “A Hundred Apocalypses”, a collection-within-a-collection uniting a series of thematically linked pieces, there are stories as short as ten words. The contexts of place and character shrink to nearly nothing.

Such “flash fiction” sections are apocalyptic only by association; in themselves they are aphorisms, recollections, or anecdotes. Taken as a whole, “A Hundred Apocalypses” implies a vision of the strange as inextricable from the commonplace: when a band plays a concert for the few people to have survived one apocalypse, the narrator’s concern is with dodging the price of the ticket; a man attending an unruly exhibition of computer-controlled holograms is bumped and loses his glasses. Even in the wasteland, we are unable to escape the small irritations and confusions that make us human.

Although less obvious, this is another link between Apocalypses and Isle of Youth: both use genre conventions – albeit from extremely different genres – to investigate the familial, the emotional, and the personal. In “Madmen”, when the narrator experiences her first period, the time has come to visit the pound-like centre where the mad are kept and choose one. In the battle of wills that ensues between the narrator and her mother, the issue of what is being chosen is hardly important; what matters is the sensitivity with which Corin explores the family dynamic.

[Jim Ivy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucy Corin has a way of taking the reader on a roundabout trip to the grocery store that feels more like an adventure in the jungle. Much of the short chapters in this book read like a WSB cut-up piece where I was not able to follow what was written until the following chapter or two. And I love that. Other times, it was not necessary to follow what was happening; the feeling it left me with was sufficiently satisfying and succinctly pointed. In other words, the jungle. I will most certainly read more of her work!

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are four short stories in this collection, or rather three short stories and one hard-to-describe collection of very short vignettes.

The three short stories were haunting. I read them carefully and considered rereading them almost immediately. They stayed on my mind for a long time.

I got really bogged down reading the One Hundred Apocalypses. I think the lack of structure and narrative (at least as far as I could tell) made it hard for me to stay interested. But Corin's exploration of new formats for storytelling was very creative.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first Corin's prose reads as esoteric- minimalist and alien at the same time. Upon careful reading, however, Corin provides a careful meditation upon the symbology of apocalypses through a few short stories and a large collection of Flash Fiction. I do not recommend this for everyone, but fans of poetic, borderline avant-garde and surreal writing should find elements of this collection worth their time.

[Little · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously dystopian, this little book is full of apocalyptic vignettes. Many of them are snapshots of a literal apocalypse of the world that reveals itself after the apocalypse is over. Others are more figurative, simply showing the destruction of one person's world. Many are funny, often wryly so. Many are haunting. Many, too, are inscrutable or forgettable, but each is short, so it's no great loss to move on from one that fails to captivate.