A Peak Oil Prophet Imagines Life in America After Wal-Mart

James Howard Kunstler’s new novel describes a small town in upstate NY where a chain of global crises has forced the community to fend for itself.

Michelle Nijhuis: So you’ve wrestled with peak oil, climate change, and disease in nonfiction books. Why did you decide to address them in a novel?

James Howard Kunstler: I wanted to present a very vivid experience for readers, so they could feel what it might be like, sense what it might be like, to live in this post-oil world — a world in which the tyranny of automobiles is over with, and people are living very directly with the planet and each other. The whole issue of farming and food production comes closer to the center of life, with all of its practical requirements and ceremonies. When you’re living in that kind of economy, your society tends to follow the seasons, and a lot of the social content of everyday life is geared to planting, harvesting, and tending — it’s very different from the electronically mediated world of cubicle work.


Many of the characters have transitioned from the everyday world we know today — so they certainly have a vivid memory of what they call the old times, and they’re making the necessary adjustments to the new times.

MN: Did you have this world fully imagined from the start, or did it change in the process of writing?

JHK: There were a lot of things I knew about this world I was going to create, but I discovered a lot of things along the way. For example, it became apparent to me fairly early on that my characters would not all be riding bicycles as in some kind of ecotopia, because they would have trouble getting the materials necessary to make them.

I also realized in the first chapters that the fact that the pavement was so broken up on the roads would have a big effect on how people did things and moved around on the landscape. As far as characters, I’d originally thought that the evangelicals would be the bad guys, but they behaved rather valiantly. I also became very fond of their leader, Brother Job, who’s kind of a combination of Boss Hogg and Captain Ahab. He’s kind of a darkly comic buffoon, with a deep air of mystery about him. I like that.

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