He is legend

Neil Strauss is a survivor. The former New York Times music writer has endured Mötley Crüe’s debauchery (The Dirt), a crash course in the rites of pickup artists (The Game) and hanging out with Jenna Jameson (How to Make Love Like a Porn Star). Now he’s back with Emergency, a book in which he anticipates world catastrophes and tells you how to outlive them. To test Strauss’s disaster-averting skills, TONY presented him with scenarios, all lifted from fiction, and asked: What would Neil do?

THE BOOKS

Liberation, by Brian Francis Slattery
A collapsed economy causes America to drastically regress. Unless you team up with a group of international criminals, the best chance for survival involves selling yourself into slavery. What to do?

WHAT WOULD NEIL DO?
“When confronted with the decision of freedom versus security, take freedom. And that freedom will be a lot easier to keep if you’re friends with loyal, talented criminals, like the “slick six” in this book. After all, one of the keys to staying alive when the shit hits the fan is having a trusted network of friends, cross-trained in different survival skills. Besides, antiheroes are the new heroes anyway.”

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Nuclear blasts kill most people and all vegetable life. Survivors are hungry, pursued by cannibals and afraid of their own slip into animalistic immorality. Are you prepared?

WHAT WOULD NEIL DO?
“It’s a small miracle the father and son in this novel fare as well as they do. There are skills they could have used to make staying alive a little easier. Instead of going days without water, they could have made a solar still to obtain water through condensation and used dead branches or batteries from abandoned cars to start fires. Some mantrapping skills gleaned from the writings of militant survivalist Ragnar Benson wouldn’t have hurt either.”

Last Last Chance, by Fiona Maazel
After a plague is unleashed, the drug-abusing protag tries to weather the pestilence from inside a remote rehab facility. She’s temporarily safe, but has no info from outside. Stay put, or go explore?

WHAT WOULD NEIL DO?
“You train to repel intruders, set up a 24-hour observation post and wait it out. If you’re in a house full of addicts, trust no one. Most important, make sure that you’re the only one with a skill necessary for everyone’s survival. This way, if supplies run low and things go the way of the Donner Party, you’ll be the last one on the dinner table. Ultimately, the plague in this book doesn’t kill many people, so the real lesson is that you retreat from a real threat, not an imagined one.”

Quake, by Rudolph Wurlitzer
An earthquake rocks Los Angeles, and those who weren’t crushed by toppled buildings have to avoid a militant group that immediately springs up to take over the city. Join the creepy thugs? Or try to survive solo?

WHAT WOULD NEIL DO?
“There’s another option: As the survivalists put it, G.O.O.D.—get out of dodge. Every good survivalist has at least one escape route mapped out to a safe, well-fortified location outside the impact zone. If you’re really hard-core, you’ll build a gyrocopter in your backyard and fly out of harm’s way.”

World Made by Hand, by James Howard Kunstler
The economy collapses and society turns chaotic. Earle, the book’s beleaguered hero, has been elected mayor of a town in upstate New York, but redneck factions and new cults start to squabble. Should he stand tall or let civilization crumble?

WHAT WOULD NEIL DO?
“The number-one rule of all rescue workers is: Help the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time—without putting yourself in harm’s way. When heroes become victims, they aren’t helping anybody. And Earle, in this novel, becomes a victim, surviving only due to luck, mercy and some sort of divine intervention. These are not survival skills; planning, foresight and preparing for contingencies are.”

The Albertine Notes, by Rick Moody
A dirty bomb destroys Manhattan, but hey, there’s still Staten Island. There, our hero works at a newspaper and succumbs to a popular new drug known as Albertine, which inspires sweet memories but drowns out reality. Just say no?

WHAT WOULD NEIL DO?
“To quote my former editor at The New York Times, ‘Who wants to live in a world without New York?’ Take the Albertine, and live in the past.”

Emergency (Harper, $16.99 paperback) is out now. Strauss reads Tue 10 at Barnes & Noble Warren St.

See more Books >>