A Tidy Armageddon

(Paperback)

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After emerging from a bunker, Sergeant Elsie Sharpcot, a shrewd war vet, and her PTSD-afflicted second in command, Dorian Wakely, must lead a group of six soldiers through a world in which all products of human creation have been arranged by an unknown hand into a vast grid resembling an outdoor warehouse.

A novel in the vein of Cormac McCarthys The Road and Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven, showcasing the devastating scale of mass consumption while delivering a suspenseful and action-rich tale of human connection, loss, and resilience

The world is utterly transformed: every product of human creation has been organized by an unknown hand into a vast grid of nine-story blocks, each comprised of a single item type: watering cans, lighthouses, fake Christmas trees, helicopters, plastic spoons, and everything else Earths culture and technology have ever produced, stacked in homogenous towers and separated by a maze of passageways.

Navigating this depopulated environment, a small contingent of diverse soldiers tries to make sense of this enigmatic apocalypse while desperately searching for survivors. They are led by Elsie Sharpcot, a Cree woman who has endured the militarys rampant racism and misogyny, and Dorian Wakely, her PTSD-afflicted second-in-command. Both veterans of the war in Afghanistan, they lead a group of army misfits while they all struggle against the elements and each other to survive.

Passing with fear and wonder through this museum of human achievement, provisioning themselves from its resources, the group races to outrun the approaching winter and find a home.

Reviews

"A Tidy Armageddon is a gorgeous, provocative, pitch-perfect conceptual art piece in the literary lineage of Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I was immersed from the first page into a world resembling an enormous and very organized megastore, where capitalism's last breath chastened and delighted me. Had God's hand rearranged all the things just so, or was it an advanced alien civilization No, it was BH Panhuyzen in passionate authority presenting me with the end of the world in a way never before imagined. Unforgettable. " -- Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things and Wait Softly Brother
"Samuel Beckett meets Stephen King in an absurd and eerie coming-of-end tale that should serve as some sort of warning (but probably won't)." -- Peter Darbyshire, author of Has the World Ended Yet

Author Bio

BH Panhuyzen, an author of two previous novels and a collection of stories, lives in Toronto with three humans, a dog, and a cat, plus works as an independent software developer. BH fears that all this personal recycling, squishing every cereal box and milk carton, might not be working.