For reasons that will be explained later, her relationship with her brother is fraught, and their different disaster-management approaches only make things worse. Several states away, in Aurora, Ill., Thom’s sister, Aubrey, has her own preoccupations - a surly stepson, an elderly neighbor, a nefarious ex-husband, the need to persuade the guy who used to grow weed to switch to vegetables. (Can money insulate a person from the collapse of the world? Discuss.) In a homage to the eerie “Twilight Zone” episode “Time Enough to Last,” he’s also stashed 12 extra pairs of prescription glasses in his bedside table. Thom Banning, a tech billionaire who has grimly anticipated the end of days by building a vast underground bunker in the Utah desert, moves in with his family and a large staff that includes a pilot, a yoga instructor, two chefs and a dentist. His book spares us heavy scenes of mass violence and rotting bodies, sticking instead to the stories of a few people trying to find their way through it all.
But Koepp, a screenwriter (“Jurassic Park”) and novelist (“ Cold Storage”), focuses less on global problems than local responses. Society’s fabric quickly unravels, as it tends to do in stories that dance at the edges of apocalypse.
(In a neat trick, the cataclysm barely touches the countries nearest to the Equator, which immediately offer humanitarian aid to the struggling nations of Europe and North America.) In AURORA (Harper, 292 pp., $27.99), David Koepp offers a new unpleasant scenario, a solar storm called a coronal mass ejection that summarily knocks out most of the world’s power. Nuclear Armageddon, killer viruses, massive tidal waves, alien attacks, apocalyptic space debris - there are so many ways it could go wrong for our battered little planet.
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