Author Tours The ‘End Of The World,’ From Prairie Bunkers To Apocalypse Mansions

While researching his new book, Notes from an Apocalypse, about people who are preparing for doomsday, author Mark O’Connell undertook what he calls “a series of perverse pilgrimages.” Some stops on O’Connell’s “end of the world” journey include a prairie in South Dakota, where a former munitions facility is being converted into a “survival shelter community,” and the New Zealand apocalypse house owned by PayPal founder Peter Thiel . He also attended a Los Angeles conference, where he met people who hope to colonize Mars and use it as a “backup planet” if Earth becomes inhospitable. Though it was written before the COVID-19 pandemic, O’Connell says the research he conducted for the book is heavy with “dramatic irony” now. “I bought a lot of practical guides to surviving the end of the world — doomsday prepper guides and so on — when I was writing the book,” he says. “And I read them at the time in a spirit of scholarly interest.” But as the pandemic spread, he says, “I found myself