My grandpa was a doomsday prepper. In 1962 he purchased fifty-four acres of land in a remote part of Oregon, which he planned to put to good use growing trees to log every fifty years or so. But that was not the primary motivation for his purchase. He had chosen this specific spot between San Francisco and Seattle after setting his engineering skills to calculating where atomic fallout would least likely circulate after those two cities were obliterated in the coming nuclear apocalypse. In my grandpa's fantasy, everyone would die but for his clan, who would survive in a postapocalyptic Eden. To me, my grandpa's logic seems backwards. Who would want to live in this postapocalyptic nightmare world? Why would I prepare for contingencies that did not also account for the safety and survival of my neighbors, friends, and colleagues? How could I live on knowing that I had done only enough to save myself? What if this self-centered thinking is precisely what precludes the human altruism necessary to stave off a nuclear war? Patriotic courage is typically epitomized by soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice for their country—is not doomsday prepping precisely the opposite, a manifestation of a selfish sort of mega-cowardice? It seems to me that if everyone thought like my grandpa did, that would perversely guarantee nuclear war. He who builds an ark, thirsts for the flood. From my perspective, if there were a nuclear holocaust or some world-ending event, then I agree with Mark Harwell's assessment in the final pages of his book Nuclear Winter: “The optimal location to be . . . may well be at some ground zero.”1Understanding the psyche of my apocalyptic prepper grandpa and people like him is why I picked up Casey Ryan Kelly's prescient book, Apocalypse Man. Kelly's exploration expands well beyond the narrow category of doomsday preppers, which is the subject of the first chapter. Kelly identifies doomsday preppers as belonging to a greater category, the “apocalyptic male” (Introduction), which includes “red pill” subscribers (Chapter 2), “incels” (short for “involuntary celibates”) (Chapter 3), open carry proponents (Chapter 4), the followers of former President Donald Trump, and what Kelly calls Trump's “rhetoric of aggrievement” (Chapter 5). Rather than dismiss the apocalyptic male as an aberration or the ramblings of a lunatic (as I might have before reading this book), Kelly dedicates serious time, attention, close reading, and criticism to understanding the apocalyptic male's psychological profile and politics. This deviant profile is especially dangerous to the extent that it is becoming more and more prevalent. As evinced by a never-ending and ever-increasing succession of terrorist activity in America since 9/11 (archived by NewAmerica.org) and the publication of Kelly's book, the apocalyptic male is becoming normalized. Just what constitutes the apocalyptic male?The paradox at the center of the apocalyptic male mentality as Kelly defines it is the belief in the rightful supremacy of the heterosexual white male and, simultaneously, the unjust victimhood that aggrieves him and prevents him from achieving “the good life.” These narratives of victimization are wide-ranging, resulting in groups of like-minded aggrieved . . . white men [who] have been emasculated by the family court system, affirmative action programs, man-hating feminists, gold-digging ex-wives, political correctness, job-taking immigrants, the social acceptance of queer intimacy, and even television situation comedies that satirize oafish working-class fathers. Popular articulations of wounded white masculinity reflect the rise of a reactionary politics of white male resentment that seizes tropes of victimhood and marginalization even as it celebrates white male primacy (2).Kelly shows how doomsday preppers, as seen on the popular eponymous series broadcasted on National Geographic, are not merely cosplaying the apocalypse; rather, they are longing for the coming of some sort of catastrophe which will return the white male to his proper place in a postapocalyptic hunter-gatherer world. “Red-pillers” and incels partake in the fetishization of their perceived victimhood, which Kelly grounds in the language of Freudian psychology. These are people who perversely take sadomasochistic pleasure in the act of bearing their wounds to one another and commiserating in online discussion board communities where they fantasize together about subsequent “righteous violence” (27). The incel sees himself as blameless. The problem lies not with himself, but with all women (if not all womankind) who fail to recognize the incel's natural superiority and desirability. The apocalyptic male takes no responsibility for his lot; it is always the world that is wrong. As Kelly argues: Abject white masculinity is underwritten by a powerful script of victimization that blames feminism and multiculturalism for white men's dwindling social and economic privileges. When one lives a life of entitlement, even the most modest demands for equality can be perceived as an assault (7).Kelly explains the effectiveness of the Trump campaign slogan “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” noting that it appeals to nostalgia for an imagined past in which these forces (immigrant caravans, feminists, non-white people, women, etc.) have not “penetrated” the victimized white male. The white male is returned to his rightful place as the apex predator of civilization (139). The dog whistle of MAGA is an implied answer to an implied question: Great for whom? To return the apocalyptic male to power would indeed require an apocalypse for everyone else.Kelly leads his reader through example after example of various manifestations of the category of apocalypse man. “Open Carry” laws are the subject of Chapter 4, which considers the pernicious logic of Second Amendment rhetoric. Kelly places this fantasy of the “good guy with a gun,” who might protect us (which us?) from an oppressive state, within the context of apocalyptic rhetoric. The overlap between “Open Carry” and incels in particular is seen in the overtly sexual language of guns “blowing,” “shooting a load,” “firing blanks,” in which the feelings of impotence, aggrievement, and disempowerment can be displaced and redeemed. “Open Carry” discourses depend on a phallocentric object (a gun) that promises the redemption of the apocalyptic male via righteous violence against a perceived—and often overtly coded Black—other (107–109).My copy of Apocalypse Man has found a spot on the bookshelf next to some topical company. I have shelved it aside Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia, a book that adds to Kelly's discussion of a particular flavor of misogynist nostalgia.2Cruel Optimism (2011) also leans against Kelly's book, in which Lauren Berlant describes the injurious sort of optimism that fantasizes an impossible future.3 Such optimism undergirds the fantasies of the apocalyptic male who dreams of a future in which patriarchy is restored by violence. In pursuing this impossible fantasy, this violent cruel optimism, the apocalyptic male is himself precluded from any possible “good life.” Another work in conversation with Apocalypse Man is Donna Zuckerberg's analysis of the use of classical allusion in misogynist and supremacist hate speech in Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age.4 These books agree with and strengthen Kelly's psychological taxonomy of the apocalyptic male; no doubt more critical discussion will be necessary given recent targeted persecution of the trans community by the conservative right.If one wanted to stare deeply into the abyss of fragile white supremacist misogyny, Kelly's category might expand to accommodate communities that have gained significant power and notoriety in recent months: QAnon followers, Boogaloo Boys, Three Percenters, and the like. Fittingly, Kelly begins and ends his book with vignettes of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA. Were Kelly to re-write this book today, he just as well could have begun and ended the book with the January 6th Capitol Insurrection. Whether or not Donald Trump manages to win another term in office in 2024, apocalypse men will be legion. The ramifications of their aggrieved worldview will continue to have deadly consequences. And that fact is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of Kelly's horrifyingly relevant book.