A doom with a view

COMET HITHER Currie envisions a cosmic disaster with fear and titillation

Photograph: Sarah Woehler Michaud

With his 2007 story collection, God Is Dead, Ron Currie Jr. presented a lurid dystopia in which best friends blew each other’s brains out, armies battled over obscure philosophical ideologies, and Sudanese dogs ate the Lord’s body. Now the author is back with Everything Matters!, a highly affecting novel about the end of the world. “I’ve always been obsessed with apocalypse,” Currie tells TONY over a sandwich in midtown. “It’s a simultaneous fascination and revulsion.”

Fixation and fear are abundant in Everything Matters!, the story of Junior Thibodeau, a preternaturally brilliant man who is born knowing a terrible fact. While he’s still in the womb, a voice tells him that a comet will strike the earth on June 15, 2010, when he will be 35, obliterating all of humanity. “In some ways, the book is a metaphor for our awareness of our own mortality,” Currie says. “Junior knows his expiration date.”

Junior hears voices in his head, an alien narrator that lends him an odd telepathy as he struggles to save humanity by working in secrecy for the U.S. government, which plans to spirit survivors away from the doomed planet on spaceships. Lest the reader consider him an unreliable (or psychotic) storyteller, Junior’s version of events is backed up by the novel’s rotating cast of narrators, which includes our hero’s love interest, Amy, and his cokehead baseball-star brother, Rodney.

Everything Matters! is much more than a sci-fi riff on encroaching doom. Currie expertly blends far-out fantasy elements with an insistent drama about drug abuse, young love and illness. And forget comparisons to The Road: Currie mixes the weight of everyday tragedy with a hyperbolic adventure story that’s got the international intrigue of a John LeCarre thriller and the deep humor of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Currie’s childhood in Maine goes a long way toward explaining his genre-hopping vision. He grew up on everything from the “Tolkienesque” sagas of the “Dragonlance Chronicles” to the horror of Stephen King. As a young fan of George Romero flicks, he’d watch zombie movies and then go to work delivering newspapers at 4am (“That’s the time of the day that very closely resembles the abandoned cityscapes of Romero’s films,” the author says. “There I am, deliberately frightening the shit out of myself.”) And even now, he still delights in apocalyptic TV, eager to discuss programs about how roving black holes could blot out our existence. “There are a lot of nightmares out there in the universe that could befall us,” he says. “This is the sort of thing that I love.” If all goes well, Currie’s novel could become a film that will frighten the children of the future; the book’s rights have been optioned by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the Oscar-winning director of The Lives of Others.

Though Currie disavows a strictly autobiographical reading of Everything Matters!, he admits that there’s something distinctly therapeutic about the novelist’s craft. The book raises plenty of questions about the relevance of human existence, and about death itself, but in the world of his novel, the author feels that he can exert at least a little bit of control over these paralyzing ideas. “The end of the world here is a stand-in for our knowledge of our own mortality,” Currie says. “But one of the nice things about writing fiction is that you get to make things neat. You get to right wrongs. You can bring back the dead.”

Everything Matters! (Viking, $25.95) is out now. Currie reads Mon 6 at McNally Jackson Booksellers and Tue 7 at Barnes and Noble.

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