Your Best Apocalypse Now

By Taylor Hohulin

Daniel Blake isn't a prophet, but by the time two angels show up on his couch with questions about his visions, he's in too deep to come clean.

When Daniel wrote Your Best Apocalypse Now, it was supposed to be a scam. Instead, it was an accurate breakdown of the official plan for the apocalypse. The only problem? Doomsday hasn't gone according to plan. When the appointed time comes (October 15, 2021, at precisely 10:56 pm, Central Standard Time, if you're curious), the great world-devouring beast Fyarthlohopp is a complete no-show. Now the angels want answers, and they think Daniel has them.

Daniel wouldn't mind if the end of the world got postponed a little longer—he is, after all, somewhat attached to the world in question—so he joins the angels on a quest to investigate how Fyarthlohopp could miss such a crucial appointment. The way Daniel sees it, if he's going to save the world, the best place he can be is with the creatures tasked with its destruction.

As Daniel embarks on a journey filled with strange creatures, alternate dimensions, and a surprising number of offices, one question burns bright in his mind and refuses to go away: How does one sabotage an apocalypse, anyway?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taylor Hohulin
• Release date: Aug 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393920731

Taylor Hohulin

Taylor is a radio personality by morning, a science fiction author by afternoon, and asleep by 9:30. His weaknesses include Oreos, his dog, and Sharknado movies.

Book preview

The End

The sun will be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

-Jesus Christ, the Gospel of Matthew

King James Version

The world will end on October 15, 2021, at precisely 10:56pm, Eastern Time, but don’t let that stop you from living your biggest joy today!

-Daniel Blake, Your Best Apocalypse Now: Why the End of the World is the Beginning of Your Joy

Book Club Version: Revised with Small Group Discussion Questions

Your Best Apocalypse Now

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Replies To Your Email

IN RETROSPECT, THE book signing was a mistake. I doubt it would’ve changed anything if I’d stayed under the radar, but if I could do it all over again, I’d skip that afternoon at Pages For All Ages. Same with the stupid apocalypse party.

Let me rewind.

I got the idea for the whole scheme—and believe me; it was a scheme—right around the time hope ran dry that anyone would publish my fifth novel. No one wanted to publish the first four, and the combined words of every form rejection letter I’d received were enough to equal one of my dust-collecting manuscripts. I started to wonder if I even had a Great American Novel inside me.

As I wrapped myself in a blanket of depression and self-doubt, I logged onto The Supreme Lifter of Moods, The Almighty Facebook.

And, alas, my mood was not lifted.

The top story on my feed came from a friend reposting a blog from an author. A published author. The worst twist of the knife? It was one of those authors who wrote a far-fetched prediction about the end of the world and had the audacity to call it a book. He had some outlandish theory involving Jewish folklore, math, and the latest single from a pop star I hadn’t heard of.

And he’d gotten published.

I’d spent the better part of two decades agonizing over thematic content and character arcs awash in emotionally resonant imagery. This goober puked a Kafka-on-Mountain-Dew vision of the apocalypse into his computer. Which one of us had his work in print?

The goober.

Oops, scratch that. A quick peek at the Amazon rankings showed this was a best-selling goober.

I’m positive a chunk of those sales were jokes, but still. The guy was making decent money off something he wrote, and he probably didn’t even work that hard. None of the excerpts I read seemed like they’d come from a hardworking writer.

That was when I got the idea. At the time, it was just a joke, a thumbing of my nose at the industry that rejected my years of toil in favor of this insult to the English language. But as I began the ridiculous process of connecting random events and numerical coincidences, I found myself puking out a nonsensical end-of-the-world prediction of my own. I hammered the whole thing out in a couple months and spent a week editing it. It felt good, the same way typing something dumb into the comment section on a news story feels good.

The final product was awful. Spectacularly awful. It made the goober look like Nostradamus, like Saint John on the island of Patmos, like that pig who always picks the Super Bowl winner by eating the right Oreo. But I wasn’t done with my joke on the industry, because no joke is complete until you tell it. The next step was to email literary agents, telling them I knew how the world would end and that they had the unique opportunity to publish my book and prepare said world for its inevitable doom. Most of them ignored me.

Except for Harold Greene.

I’d almost forgotten about my joke of a book when I saw his name pop up in my inbox. He replied with a single sentence. No greeting, no signature, no sent from my iPhone, please excuse typos made by my huge fingers because I’m so old HAHAHAHA.

Just, You don’t really believe this, do you?

For a second, my finger hovered over the delete key. The joke was over. I’d gotten the poison out of my system, and it was time to return to serious literature. You know what they say, right? Sixth time’s the charm. But Harold’s email had a very important distinction that set it apart from other literary agent responses:

It wasn’t a form letter.

Harold had read my book and crafted a personal response, short and skeptical though it was. I figured I owed him a short, personalized response of my own.

So I said, Nope.

In the next email, Harold sent me his phone number. From there, we were off. It turned out Harold had noticed the same trend I had. According to him, a whole cottage industry had sprung up around end-of-the-world prophecy books. There was just enough demand to send cheaply produced prophecies to market, one after another. As each prophet-author proved to be full of holy baloney, a newcomer could be waiting to take his place—or her place; it is 2019, after all.

Harold saw a literary goldmine, and in me, he’d found his pickax.

The scheme was simple. Harold picked up my apocalyptic manifesto and shopped it to publishers, giving me a pen name to conceal my identity. Meanwhile, he gave me the assignment to write another end-times prophecy. Once I finished, he’d shop that one under a new pen name. For the next year, I churned out books, each prediction more outlandish than the last, each under a different pseudonym. I became Dougal Basso, Lammert Braune, Philip Kiefer, Otokar Hagen, and more. When a prophecy inevitably didn’t come true, the pseudonym vanished, another one-hit wonder in the brutal literary market of apocalypse prediction.

I wrote five books that first year, and you know what? Harold found publishers for them. Every. Single. One.

When the books starting releasing, they sold like hotcakes. I mean, not hotcakes that get adapted to movies starring Johnny Depp, but at least hotcakes that keep the hotcake stand open and leave a nice enough profit to buy a new—but not fancy—car.

The scheme worked because of the pseudonyms. You can only whiff a doomsday prophecy so many times before you start losing credibility, so it was vitally important I never publish twice under the same name. The years rolled on, along with the ridiculous theories and the pseudonyms.

And then I had the infamous book signing, and everything changed.

The First Mistake I Made

BY THE TIME THIS NEW book released, I’d lost track of how many I’d published. Sometimes Harold would call me about a book in my back catalog, and I wouldn’t even remember writing the stuff he mentioned. I honestly believe he knew my books better than I did. He was the one selling them, anyway. I just banged out nonsense on a keyboard and moved on without a second thought.

But this one...this was The One.

I never wanted to do prophecy forever. One day, I wanted my actual name on an actual book that got actual readers and actual accolades. If I played my cards right, this book could be my ticket to actual authordom.

So I slapped my name on it.

Harold was against it, of course. The instant I sent him the manuscript with my real name under the title, he knew what I was doing. He pushed back and he bargained, but the decision was mine. I was the engine driving the whole operation, and he was only riding the train of my success.

The way I saw it, if I wrote a book as me, not as a weird computer-generated kook of a prophet, I’d have an opportunity when it turned out to be baloney. After the baloney transformed into bestselling baloney, I could come out as the author of over fifteen successful books predicting the end of the world. Everyone who’d ever trusted me with the apocalypse might be miffed, but publishers would see I’d learned how to write bestselling fiction.

So let’s fast forward to that book signing. The book signing for The One.

I’d never done book signings. The thing about writing under a rotating lineup of pseudonyms is you can’t appear in public. Otherwise, someone might realize that Adrian Axelson and Nabil Volk are the same person. But if this book was different, if it was my breakout project, it had to, well, break out. And that meant publicity, like book signings.

To Harold’s credit, he did all the legwork. As it turns out, I’m a master at begging, nagging, and other methods of persuasive annoyance. Once I finished with him, he agreed to make all the arrangements. I only had to show up.

The book was called Your Best Apocalypse Now, and it was part paranoid end-of-the-world prediction and part feel-good self-help book. Over my not-so-storied career, I learned what my readers really wanted wasn’t so much to know the world would end in fire or floods or too many blood moons, but to find permission to live their best lives and be their best selves because the world was about to explode from too many kids reading books with witchcraft.

Your Best Apocalypse Now did well. Something in the blend of paranoid prophecies and saccharine self-affirmations resonated like nothing I’d ever written. From day one, the book sold like actual hotcakes—remember the ones I mentioned earlier where Johnny Depp got involved?—and before you could say Mayan Calendar, Your Best Apocalypse Now shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

I had achieved the success I always dreamed of, only I hadn’t written the Great American Novel. I’d written a Great American Pile of Garbage That Even The Goober Himself Would Condemn.

But my name was on it. I’d known from the start this one had a chance to be special, and I’d be darned if I didn’t ride that wave of success.

So on a sunny afternoon in April, I walked up to a bookstore called Pages For All Ages carrying a suitcase filled with hardcover copies of Your Best Apocalypse Now. It wasn’t the fanciest of venues, but it was a place to get started. I pulled open the glass front door, and aluminum bells jingled overhead.

Yes, hello! said a voice from the back. Welcome to Pages for All Ages! Anything I can help you find?

Yeah, I’m, uh...I’m Daniel Blake.

The cool thing about being a bestselling author is you can just introduce yourself, and it’s a terribly meaningful sentence.

Oh!

A blond head popped up from behind a bookshelf lined with covers sporting women in various stages of undress and men in various stages of chiseled abs. A chipper smile lit her face as she scurried around the shelves.

It’s so great to meet you, Mr. Blake. Or Daniel. Can I call you Daniel?

As she reached for my hand, I noticed a slight tremble in her fingers. She was nervous. A fan.

So I put on my best author-greeting-a-beloved-reader grin, wrapped her hand in mine and said, I’d be upset if you didn’t.

Okay, maybe that line was a bit much. Not bad for my first fan interaction, though.

The woman blushed, backed away. I have to tell you, I’ve never been wild about self-help books. Always shelved them near the back of the store. Because of the weirdos, you know? But then we got a few copies of your book, and I read the reviews, and I picked it up, and I...

Something caught in the woman’s throat. She pressed her hand to her lips, stifling a sob as tears glittered at the corners of her eyes.

"I used to be so overweight, Daniel. You don’t even know. But I read this book, and everything you had to say, and it just... She held her hands out, as if reaching into the psychic ether around her for the right words. I read that passage...you know the one."

I didn’t. I nodded anyway.

She smiled a knowing smile, reading my nod as permission to quote my brilliance back to me. "Just because the great beast Fyarthlohopp will consume all of creation, you don’t have to consume all of your feelings."

I wrote that? Puke.

She shook her head. "It made all the difference, Daniel. You’ll never know what those words did for me. I’ve lost fifty pounds...and counting! And it’s because of you. Knowing Fyarthlohopp is coming for us...knowing he’s coming for me...and knowing there’s nothing I can do to stop him...it’s freed me. The world is ending, but it feels like my life is finally beginning."

I cued up another schmaltzy smile, shook her hand, and said, And it is, my daughter. It is.

My daughter? Who was I?

But she remained resolutely starry-eyed, and so I rolled with it, following her to the folding table she’d set up for me to meet people who shared her devotion to my steaming pile of puke.

The woman introduced herself as Phyllis McSomething, an entrepreneur who’d used her alimony checks and some strategic loans to start a small business with Pages for All Ages. She loved books—mostly the kinds with monsters running around shirtless (all the better to seduce you, my dear) and wanted others to experience the same joy she did when escaping into her fantasy worlds.

If she only knew Your Best Apocalypse Now had transported her to a fantasy world, too.

Phyllis presented the folding table with pride, as if it hadn’t come from a storage unit via a rusty dolly, but had been carved from ivory by diligent holy artists. This was no table made for book signing, but an altar made to bear sacrifices, pleasing and lovely to the great beast Fyarthlohopp who would one day consume all of humanity.

This was the only book signing I’d ever done, so I didn’t know if the setup was good or bad or par for the course. I told Phyllis it was perfect and set about decorating the space with my tablecloth, books, and backdrop.

And so began my first big mistake.

The Second Mistake I Made

I SHOULD REITERATE that nothing would have changed if I’d skipped the book signing altogether. The wheels that turned then had been turning for ages. I was just a grain of sand crushed in the treads.

But still