This is the Way the World Ends

From the author of The Wine of Violence and The Continent of Lies: an anti-nuclear polemic, somewhat ameliorated by Morrow's un-parochial, European-flavored style and outlook. In 1995, USA, "scopas" suits - supposed to protect the wearer against all the deadly effects of nuclear blast - are all the rage. Contented tombstone engraver George Paxton regrets only that he cannot afford one for his beloved daughter. Naturally, the scopas suits don't work. But then George is mysteriously offered a different model that does work; the price: his signature on a document admitting his complicity in the nuclear-arms race. George signs gladly, but before he can take the suit home, war breaks out and his family is vaporized. Badly burned by radiation, he is rescued by weird entities, "Unadmitteds," and taken aboard a nuclear submarine heading for Antarctica. (The Unadmitteds, with black blood and a sulfurous odor, are persons who were never born but might have been; created spontaneously by macrocosmic quantum effects, they will live for a year and then return to nothingness.) Aboard the submarine, the Unadmitteds have assembled George, a hawkish TV evangelist, the yes man Assistant Secretary of Defense, a mad psychotherapist, and an unrepentant Air Force general, for the purpose of putting them on trial for crimes against humanity. The trial, by turns biting and hilarious, forms the centerpiece of Morrow's indictment of the whole nuclear madness. Yet all this, no matter how impressive as a document, makes for a badly flawed novel, what with the intentionally stereotyped characters, the skimpy plot, the clever but affected drama, and the exceedingly hard-to-swallow "Unadmitted" notion. Overall, disappointingly ordinary work from an author who still hasn't fulfilled his early promise. (Kirkus Reviews)