Apocalypse Now?

Judgment Day is everyday with Mike Davis. The La Brea tar pits are his spiritual birthplace, apocalypse is his middle name and the plagues that visited the ancient Egyptians are his psychic companions. As readers of his earlier powerful apoca-literature, City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, know, this mordantly scathing writer doesn't just research his work, he exhumes it.

Damning humankind's "malice to the landscape" and its abused inhabitants, Davis turned Southern California's palm-strewn paradise into an allegory of fire and brimstone, a climactic urban horror story. "The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future," he proposed in his signature work, City of Quartz, a decade ago. "The desert around Llano has been prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis."

After setting the match to the City of Angels, Davis's books illuminated parallel graveyards--ravaged cities, maltreated minorities and scenarios scarred by ecological and racial conflagrations ablaze in a decade less potentially holocaustical than our own. These days, when real life lives up to his nightmare visions--and Bill Moyers confirms that "if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture"--this chronicler of urban pestilence might find still more readers for his new book, Dead Cities: And Other Tales.

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