Six years ago, Michael McCord offered a dire warning in the first part of his Real America saga, and this second installment, End Times: More Great Adventures in Real America, is disturbingly relevant and eerily recognizable.
The story centers around an alternate American universe that combines the best elements of an organized crime syndicate, a racist death cult, and an “every man for himself” philosophy. With a deplorable demagogue, Lawrence C. “Demon Seed” Bowie, at the head of this twisted new order, it’s impossible not to see the parallels between this outlandish story and the political reality of modern America.
It’s said that reality is starting to outpace satire: if the current political climate were put into fiction, readers wouldn’t find it believable. McCord manages to avoid this quandary by making a novel that is entertaining and insightful on its own terms, adding a new interpretation of the strange drama unfolding before us.
Even though readers will immediately see the parallels between McCord’s America and the one of today, the storyline is just outlandish enough to offer renewed perspective on the current political moment, so this off-the-rails novel edges closer to disturbing than dismissible. A few years ago, this satire of American politics might have been labeled clumsy or hyperbolic, but with every passing news cycle, the content and tone of this book seem more dialed in the direction of the United States today. So the novel manages to be distressingly realistic, which exemplifies just how far down the rabbit hole the political situation has gone.
From the pro-white rhetoric and childish name-calling, to proposed race wars against moocher-liberal-feminists, there are moments on nearly every page that will snap your brain to a recent headline. The supporting characters are hilarious and bizarrely original: the master psychic spy handler or the disapproving mother of the new American Emperor walk an impressively fine line between character and caricature.
Importantly, this isn’t just a thinly veiled manifesto of hate for Donald Trump and MAGA followers – though the above may suggest otherwise, and the novel will certainly be more immediately appealing to readers of a certain political stripe. But there are also important conversations about power, justice, economics, and international cooperation that play out in these pages. This type of reactionary writing is precisely what social revolutions have been built on in the past.
The juxtaposition of Old America vs. Real America can be somewhat reductive, and there is a slight lack of nuance in some of the allegorical elements of this story, but it generally offers a kind of tongue-in-cheek catharsis. The tiny details are what make the book hum with energy and snark, including the “Guardians of Galt,” an Ayn Rand reference describing the most elite of the super rich in this horror show of America.
The language of the book is simple and straightforward, with limited need for flowering descriptions or long philosophical pieces of narration. The ideas of this book are flung across the room between characters, or spewed directly into microphones, giving the prose a visceral and immediate relevance. Ultimately, McCord’s latest book declares that the time for delicate social commentary has come to an end, and End Times offers an intelligent and incisive shot across the bow.
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