Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
By Mark O’Connell
252 pages
I started reading Notes From An Apocalypse in April 2020, you know when toilet paper was
nonexistent at most stores and well…it felt like we were heading into an apocalypse. I honestly
wondered if this book was fiction until I got to page 28 and the author, Mark O’Connell,
describes a YouTube video he watched “Top Ten Sheep Dog Gangs That Will Form After the
Collapse.” I was so intrigued by this reference I quickly dropped the book and opened up
YouTube. Sure enough, there was YouTuber, J.J. Johnson, walking his 80,000+ subscribers
through his analysis of these “sheep dog gang” formations. A couple of hours later I was still
watching the J.J. Johnson’s Reality Survival channel with videos ranging from a Holtzman’s
Gorilla Survival Knife Review (just a 42-minute video) to Top 50 Items to Be Bartered After a
SHTF (look it up if you don’t know the acronym) catastrophe (spoiler alert toilet paper didn’t
make the top 10).
Anyhow…back to the book. Mark O’Connell, from Dublin, Ireland, initially started writing this
book over four years ago and it documents his journey into the world of extreme prepping for the
apocalypse. His journey takes him from Europe to New Zealand to South Dakota and many
places in between in his effort to understand this world or more importantly who will be prepared
when the world ends. Think of this book as a comic companion to help prepare the father and
son duo in Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel, The Road.
My favorite chapter might be chapter three on luxury survival. I’m now hoping that I one day
add to my rolodex a contact of someone like Robert Vincino described in this chapter. I doubt
I’ll ever own a luxury 2,200 square foot bunker near the South Dakota Black Hills (with built in
security that can spot anyone approaching within 3 miles), but I wouldn’t mind knowing
someone who has one…for you know, when SHTF occurs.
If you spent part of 2020 in a daze of apocalyptic anxiety or are just generally obsessed with
shows like Chernobyl (a definite focus of this book), you can probably relate to much of this
book. And if you haven’t contemplated the end of times, this book will open up a whole new
world for you. Either way, O’Connell takes you through a journey that is humorous, at times
bizarre, interesting, and overall a clever approach to the question about what happens when the
world ends. The author begins and ends the book with his own self-reflection of being a father
and balancing a simultaneous optimism and pessimism about the future—an internal conflict
nagging at many of us.
