Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is a fascinating tour through humanity’s long obsession with the end of the world. Part literary history, part cultural criticism, and part catalog of catastrophe, the book explores how people have imagined apocalypse across centuries of novels, films, religious movements, political ideologies, and scientific speculation.
The scope of Lynskey’s research is astonishing. He moves effortlessly from the Book of Revelation to nuclear war fiction, from H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley to Hollywood disaster movies and modern climate-change narratives. Along the way, he introduces a seemingly endless parade of prophets, novelists, filmmakers, cult leaders, scientists, and doomsayers who have tried to explain how the world might end—and what that ending would reveal about humanity itself.
What emerges is less a history of apocalypse than a history of human fears. Every era imagines destruction in its own image. Religious societies envision divine judgment. The Cold War generated visions of nuclear annihilation. Today, environmental collapse, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and technological disruption occupy the place once held by biblical horsemen. The details change, but the fascination remains remarkably constant.
One of the book’s strengths is Lynskey’s ability to treat these visions seriously without surrendering to them. He understands that apocalyptic stories are rarely just about destruction. They are often expressions of hope, warning, wish fulfillment, or moral judgment. The end of the world becomes a way of talking about the world we currently inhabit.
At times, however, the book can feel almost too comprehensive. The sheer number of books, films, historical episodes, and personalities discussed occasionally creates the feeling of reading an encyclopedia of apocalypse rather than a single sustained argument. Readers looking for a strong central thesis may find themselves overwhelmed by the abundance of examples.
Yet that abundance is also the book’s achievement. Lynskey has assembled what is likely the most exhaustive survey of end-of-the-world imagination available in a single volume. Even when the discussion wanders, it remains engaging because the subject itself is so endlessly inventive.
In the end, Everything Must Go demonstrates that humanity has spent centuries imagining its own extinction. The details differ, but the impulse is universal. We seem unable to stop asking how the story ends—and what that ending might say about who we are.
