Lucy Corin Picks Up Where Virginia Woolf Left Off
1.
In the opening story of Lucy Corin’s 100 Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney’s, 2013), a soldier returning from a war in which he tore “open a man’s belly with his sword” meets a witch who lowers him down a hollow tree, where he meets a blue dog with snowglobe eyes (the Eiffel Tower in one, a Golden Pyramid in the other) protecting a chest of promissory notes. In “Madmen,” the day the narrator gets her first period, her father gives her a gift: “a harness for my madman, the best kind, made of real leather with quality hand-stitching and brass appointments.” (She also gets a madman to strap the harness onto.) Near the end of “Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster,” images of a burning California play on TV screens in the background. A few weeks later, the whole state is “a heaving, flattened, blowing, billowing mass of ash and soot and toxicity.”
These opening stories are firmly anchored in humans desiring things—safety, money, love, forgiveness, acceptance, pleasure—but projected against absurd tableaux, whereas the final sections of the book feel deliberately unmoored. The world ends, over and over again, in flashes. The entirety of “July Fourth” reads:
Got there and the ground was covered with bodies. Lay down with everyone and looked at the sky, bracing for the explosions.
In “Bluff,” a woman wearing “the Only Jeans That Truly FitTM” watches from a mesa as the apocalypse arrives, “filling the desert with roiling black soot so fast it seemed always to have been there, gnarled, burled, paisley, churning, eddying, smoking…” In “Apocalypses Past,” it’s “uncool” to talk about pre-apocalypse predictions of the apocalypse.
