Constant Reader June 2024 YA Edition: Let's Call It A Doomsday by Katie Henry

 

 

At this point dystopian fiction has basically become so common that you might very well expect that when the world does come to the end the people who will be the most upset will be all of the writers because they’ll be out of jobs. I imagine those who look at the cover of Let’s Call It A Doomsday will no doubt think its more of the same and either ignore it as being too depressing or read it and quickly become disappointed it’s not say, the next Hunger Games or Divergent.

I didn’t believe either because I  recognized the author. Katie Henry’s first novel was Heretics Anonymous, a hysterical novel about an young atheist who is sent to a strict Catholic school and becomes friends with a young girl who wants to become a priest. She introduces him to a ban of outcasts, who among other things, including a Jewish gay man and a pagan, who form a society intent on exposing the school’s hypocrisies. The book is both hysterical and reminds me of a description of such movies as Life of Brian and Dogma: it’s heretical, but it’s not blasphemous, because many of the characters actually do have faith.

Let’s Call It A Doomsday centers on a teenage girl named Ellis Kimball. Ellis’s family are part of the Mormon faith, and I know up front that may make you think the worst about Ellis without meeting her. You don’t learn this until you’re into the second chapter and by that point Henry has got you so devoted to Ellis that it’s no longer a dealbreaker even if she was a strict fundamentalist. (She’s not, but I’ll get to that.)

Ellis Kimball deals with the kind of crippling anxiety that has invaded every aspect of her life. Every time she even considers making a decision she’s hears a voice in her head telling every conceivable way it could possibly go wrong. We first meet her in the process of failing her driver’s test for the third time because she can’t work up the will to even start the car.

Ellis tells us she’s a Mormon and we’re surprised because by now we know she lived not only in California, but Berkeley. A religion we consider among the most restrictive and a ridiculous free-spirited communion would not seem to be two tastes that could ever go together. And while Ellis does have most of her family in Utah, they have found a church which Ellis acknowledges missionaries from Idaho and Utah would ‘think we’re all a bunch of heathens with our oddball congregation and our liberal-as-Mormons can get vibe’. Indeed there are several chapters spent in Ellis’s church and Ellis clearly is a devout Mormon. She doesn’t swear, she doesn’t pollute her body, and she loves being in church. She loves the ceremony and everything about it – and she also loves it because in it, the voice in her head becomes quieter, possibly nowhere else. As she puts it:

“I come here because when we sing all is well, all is well. I believe it, if only for a moment.”

If for no other reason Doomsday is invaluable because it will give young readers insight into a faith that almost none of them will either know about or dismiss as restrictive. Ellis is fully aware of the flaws in the dogma of her church – she elucidates quite a few of them in the narration – but you can sense reading it that it gives her peace she hasn’t felt anywhere else in her life. And to be very clear, until the narrative begins in earnest, her life would be considered hell if Mormons truly believed in it.

The voice in Ellis’s head is so present that it is basically its own character: it almost speaks more than anyone else in the book. It has crippled Ellis to such an extent that everyone in her family, especially her mother, has gotten frustrated to the point that almost no one, save for her father, can speak easily to her. Ellis and her mother have such an antagonistic relationship that she genuinely believes her mother never loved her and it fills every interaction they have. Ellis’s father clearly favors her but one can only imagine how exhausting it is to constantly play the role of peacemaker. Ellis’s sister Em is usually silent about her sister’s issues but its clear she’s beginning to run out of patience. At one point in the novel she snaps and tells Ellis: “You make it worse! Why do you always make it worse?”

Ellis has regular meetings with a therapist named Martha who she’s been seeing for two years. She’s been seeing a succession of therapists since the age of eight and as we’ve seen she has spent all that time not talking about what her real problems. There are only two things she likes talking about: etymology, the origin of every single word in existence and all the possible ways the world could end.

Now you’d think her obsession with the end of the world is what causes her anxiety but that’s not entirely true. In a weird way Ellis is looking forward to the apocalypse. She has spent so much of her life as a ‘prepper’, someone who is prepared at a moment’s notice for the apocalypse, who has all the supplies that you would need in case of every possible way the world could end, all of which she has a ridiculous amount of knowledge of. It’s one of the few things she actually proud of when she discusses it with us. And while you might think her faith is part of the reason she’s certain the world will end, it’s actually not the reason – that’s not revealed until the novel is nearly over, so I won’t go into it here.

Ellis basically thinks her therapy sessions are useless until while she’s leaving she meets a girl her age named Hannah Marks in the waiting room. Hannah is wearing ragged clothes and meditating and the moment she opens her eyes, she gives a beatific smile and says: “You don’t know me. Not yet.” Ellis’ first reaction is that this is how a serial killer show starts and then she’s intrigued. Since every other interaction with another human being throws her into paralysis, this is something she actually wants to follow up on.

Then when Ellis goes to her school – a school so liberal she tells us the only rules seem to be ‘no murder, no arson, no water guns’ – she goes to the library where she spends all her time basically her entire lunch hour, hiding. Hannah is there and then gives a cryptic invitation to lunch, followed by “We’re supposed to be friends.” Ellis is so shocked by this she tells her exactly why they shouldn’t be friends – her crippling anxiety – and Hannah seems supportive. Still Ellis might have ignored it had she not mentioned her fear of the apocalypse and Hannah tells her that her obsession is ‘awesome’. After more cryptic dialogue Hannah insists their meeting is fate because she knows exactly how the world is going to end.

Reluctantly Ellis decides to follow up on this and ends up following the bread crumbs to a group of stoners in the yard. (This would be the circumstances for discipline in any other school but Ellis’s; not only is it ignored but the teachers seem to be doing more than the students.) Ellis meets three boys engaged in a deep literary and philosophical discussion and finds that Hannah is meditating in the tree. When they do the natural thing and offer her a joint, she is about to tell them that she is a Mormon – but one of the boys beats them to it.

That boy is Talmage. We will learn very quickly that he was part of Hannah’s church but was eventually kicked out because of his bi-sexuality. Ellis’s family tells her this and its clear how upset they are that even their most liberal of Mormon churches can’t bend on this rule. Ellis can relate to this more than she wants to admit. It’s clear as the novel begins – but not to Ellis herself – that she is attracted to a female member of her congregation. A lesser author would use this to say that the dogma of the Mormon church has restrained Ellis; Henry makes it very clear that Ellis is worried about so many other things in her life that dating anyone – never mind of which gender – has not even occurred to her.

Hannah tells Ellis that she has had dreams that give ideas as to details of what will happen when the world will end. They take on natures of a prophecy some of which Ellis can recognize. Hannah tells her from the start that the person who can help them untangle this is a man named Prophet Dan. She tells Ellis that he is homeless and lives among the community and finding him will reveal all.

Ellis engages in this quest with a fervor she hasn’t taken to anything in her life. As you can expect, this becomes the kind of thing her family – especially her mother – become inflamed about. There are constant arguments between the two of them in the novel and Ellis spends it increasingly sure that her mother never loved her: it is one of many things she is wrong about.

Ellis spends a lot of time with Hannah’s friends, playing a wonderful game called ‘Five-Word Books’, becoming closer to Tal in particular and spending far more time with Hannah trying to warn people of the apocalypse. But the more she presses Hannah to take action, the less Hannah actually wants to do anything about it. This increasingly frustrates Ellis and eventually she learns more and more about her. Hannah’s last girlfriend tells her that she is increasingly taking on the lifestyle of a hermit, giving away her clothes and gifts to her friends and increasingly isolating herself from anyone. The circle she’s with right now are essentially the only people who still talk to her and even they are aware how fractured she is.

Eventually we learn the dark truth behind Hannah’s search for Prophet Dan. How it pertains the narrative is a secret I will not reveal here but it shows that Hannah is just as broken as Ellis is. What is critical it has made Hannah more cynical to the point that she and Ellis eventually get into an argument as to why she wants to tell so many people about the end of the world, and that she has every reason to think it might not be the worst thing. Tal eventually asks her a variation on the same question, asking her what her goals are. All Ellis can say is “to survive.”  Tal then tells her very clearly that there’s a difference between survival and living and that Ellis needs to find a better reason to survive. This leads to the breakthrough Ellis needs to deal with when it comes to the voice in her head and why she is so desperate to be prepared for the end of the world.

It's possible I’ve made this book sound grim. So it might shock you to know that Doomsday is by far one of the funniest books I’ve reviewed for this column. Much of the humor actually comes in the way Ellis is determined to warn everybody about the apocalypse, the way she takes to it cheerfully when it comes to ordering things online and that she ultimately uses it as what amounts to a chat-up line to the girl she’s been attracted to all this time. There’s also the understandable fact that most of the people she and Ellis try to warn about naturally think that they are crazy. And there’s a lot of hysteria about the school they attend: Homecoming is called Rally Day, which Ellis describes as ‘Mardi Gras for teenagers’ (What’s our rival?” one of Hannah’s friends asks. “Sobriety.”)  At what would normally be the climatic portion of the novel Ellis decides to warn the entire school and there is no one to stop her when she walks into the unguarded PA room. (Ellis’s attempt makes her the most hysterically funny Cassandra I’ve ever encountered.)

It's also, refreshingly, one of the most devout books I’ve ever read, either for children or adults. Ellis’s faith is one of the few things in her life she has no doubts about. It has caused her immense pain in some areas (I won’t say how) but much of that has more to do with her personal doctrine than anything in the LDS. She is so convinced of the church’s sanctity that she’s actually horrified to learn that some of the most sacred rituals of Mormonism are available on YouTube. Every part of the church rituals – including the part involving testimony – gives her a comfort that few things do. In a world where so many of the young consider religion a hoax and in a region of the country where this is doubly so, there’s something endearing about how Ellis and her family have not lost their faith in God.

Stories that involve both religious faith and the apocalypse generally seem to have only two types of endings: one where the prophet is proven a false one and another where the rapture happens. What I find most profound about Doomsday is that this novel manages to find a middle ground. No the world doesn’t end at the end of the novel, but neither is Hannah revealed to be a false prophet. Certain truths are revealed that neither girl thought possible at the start of the novel and both are proven simultaneously right and wrong about everything they believed.

The last line of the novel includes the phrase: “There are so many ways a world can begin.” I won’t reveal the context and I will say that the end of the novel does have ambiguity to it. But is the nature of Ellis’s journey that for the first time in her entire life she is seeing that ambiguity can be something to be hoped for and not feared. That is the nature of both faith and grace, two virtues Ellis has never lost along that journey.