Book Review | Apocalypse Child by Carly Butler

Book jacket for Apocalypse Child by Carly Butler

By Senuri Wasalathanthri

As an avid cinephile and a lover of fiction, mystery and thriller novels – I always pondered upon what it would be like to “be on the run.” To escape society, live off the grid with just the essentials, waiting on pins and needles for something to happen, not knowing how that event is going to change your entire life. I imagine for it to be isolating, anxiety-inducing, making one yearn for an all-encompassing need and desire for normalcy. Author Carly Butler can vouch for that.

Butler's childhood began in 1990s Montana, where she was raised by her fiercely independent single mother, DJ. Together, they worked on various housing projects, ran a bed and breakfast, and brought music to their local church. Starting at age 3, Butler and her mom frequently moved from place to place, a pattern whose reasons she would only understand much later in life. During her early years, Butler attended kindergarten at a private Christian school and both she and her mother were deeply passionate about the Evangelical Christian faith.

As Butler was settling into life in Whitefish as a third grader trying to fit in with the popular kids in 1997, her mother woke her up to shocking news that the world was about to end. “It’s called Y2K, and it’s going to end the world on the first of January, the year 2000. Computers aren’t going to work anymore, governments are going to fall, we’re going to see military takeover from other countries. So, I think God wants me to take you out of school when you’re done this year. He told me to set you apart, that you’ll be just like everyone else if you stay there. We can still see your friends for as long we can, but you’ll be starting fourth grade at home, okay?” her mom explained.

Believing every conspiracy theory and Evangelical Christian predictions about governments and their inevitable takeover, Butler’s mom was determined to go on the run as an attempt to save her daughter’s life. 1998 rolled around and as DJ was looking into safe places to ride out the Y2K, a friendly encounter Butler had at the local library changed their destiny. “An elderly man came up to me, seemingly out of nowhere, and gave me a Canadian one-dollar coin. He called it a loonie. ‘Don’t spend it all in one place,’ he said with a wink as he walked away,” says Butler. Thus, in September of 1998, Butler and her mom found themselves in Smithers, BC, renting a cabin 45 minutes out of town – which became her safe haven and source of strife at the same time.

Eleven-year-old Butler spent the next four years in that cabin, facing more challenges than any child her age should have to endure. Her mother prepared her for every conceivable apocalyptic scenario, even training Butler on how to respond if something happened to her. “Animals farmed and definitely unfarmed. Snow taller than my waist. Trekking every which way for survival whether by quad or snowmobile or foot. Storing up food that was never eaten except by kleptomaniac squirrels. Watching my mom break down and cry after the windmill for electricity died, and again when the pipes froze so we had to melt buckets of snow-water and use an outhouse, and again when our favourite dog got into the anti-freeze and seizured her way into a yellow-tongued death,” were just some of the daily challenges Butler had to encounter.

As she was waiting for death and destruction to show up at her doorstep, she longed to ask, "Why are we doing this? Why is this happening to us?" but never did, because ultimately, none of it mattered; she had to learn how to detach emotionally, as it was too painful and risky. But doomsday never came. After the dawn of the new millennium, Butler and her mom visited town only to realize that nothing had changed. No riots, no guns, no war – just regular people living regular lives. And Butler was tasked to figure out what’s next.

By this time, she was not in high school, living in Canada without any legal documentation. However, she was determined to change her destiny. She built a community of friends who treated her like family through the local church, decided to get her GED diploma and took up babysitting, cooking and cleaning jobs to make an income. The more she grew up, the more her faith in her mother’s predictions about the apocalypse withered. “I was especially tired of the one big secret: other than my GED, I didn’t exist. And this fact, this secret, kept coming up, over and over, and getting in the way as I tried to forge ahead, making a life for myself that didn’t anticipate the end of the world,” Butler recalled.

Thus, with the help of those closest to her, she moved out of her mom’s place, started her paperwork to get her permanent residency in Canada and eventually, fell in love with a kind and generous man, who is now the father to her two children. She also came to learn that she was of Yaqui Indian descent like her father, and that she is bisexual. Throughout the years of her life, Butler championed a plethora of struggles – navigating the Canadian wilderness, overcoming religious trauma, forging a legal pathway for her to live in Canada, discovering her ancestral roots, coming into her identity as a bisexual, pregnancy loss and so much more; and she discovered that “Apocalypse may strike daily, but the world never ends.”

Originally published in the BC BookWorld newspaper, Autumn 2024 edition (Page 7): https://abcbookworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/AUTUMN-Full-Issue-2024.pdf