Dark days are coming. Oil will run out, temperatures will rise, governments will crumble and survivors will be forced to scratch out a preindustrial existence amid the detritus of the 20th Century.

James Howard Kunstler warned as much in his 2006 book of social criticism, "The Long Emergency." And he stays on-message in his new novel, "World Made by Hand," which sketches post-apocalyptic life in the fictional upstate New York town of Union Grove.


Homes are lit by candles. People get around on foot and drag hand carts. Gardens grow on old lawns. News from the outside world is sketchy. Since Washington was incinerated, the federal government may or may not have been relocated. Local resident Robert Ehrlich, a corporate marketer turned carpenter, soldiers on after losing his wife and daughter to sickness, bartering for his services.

His desultory life gets shaken up after a run-in with Wayne Karp, a Harley Davidson-class kingpin who runs a communal scavenging operation down the road. Things start really moving when Robert allies himself, guardedly, with Brother Jobe, the head of a righteous, pistol-packing religious community making a home in Union Grove's abandoned high school.

Slowly, sometimes violently, Robert is pulled out of his insularity.

Kunstler made his name as an acidic critic of contemporary architecture and landscapes -- or as he calls them "suburban crudscapes." He could have used the novel as an opportunity to create cardboard characters that mouth Kunstlerian themes. Instead, he sketches out a scarred world wobbling between order and chaos. Marijuana grows by the roadside, McMansions are stripped for scrap. On a visit to the state Capitol in Albany, Robert finds the lieutenant governor pathetically trying to keep government running with a typewriter and a gun.