A Pale Horse

What is it about the idea of an earthly apocalypse that demands our attention? Why are we drawn to these types of stories? Is it because as much as our biology and ego drives us towards survival and religious dogmas soothe our fear of the dark, the truth of the matter may be that there’s a small part in all of us that really looks forward to the day it all ends? And maybe on our worst days we privately think to ourselves, “Just get on with it already?”

In Jason Jordan’s hypnotic novella The Dying Horse, narrator Erik tells the story of his confrontation with the apocalypse. After his family leaves him at home to go on a Florida family vacation, things start to get weird. The elder cat of the house speaks to Erik, telling him that she and the other two cats are hitting the road. Erik is a recent college graduate who has moved back home. He diddles around mostly and does a lot of thinking about whether he’s going to play video games or eat a snack or drink bourbon. It’s while discussing the monstrous, oddly behaving tropical storms gathering strength off the coasts that Erik tells his friend Matt that people probably think these ominous storms foretell the end of the world. Then Erik goes to sleep and dreams about killing a radiant white horse. Jordan writes:

I can tell there’s a problem by the way he stares at me. His cold black eyes fixate on mine saying, Get it over with. Go on. Get it over with. The way he looks, struggling to catch every breath, is unforgettable, an image I try but fail to discard. I attempt to look away before I pull the trigger, but before I know it, I aim the shotgun and fire at the dying horse.

He wakes up to a marauding mob that’s ransacking the homes in his comfortably upper-middle-class subdivision. They’re also setting the houses on fire, so he quickly stuffs a backpack full of provisions and strangely sets his own house ablaze before leaving. After escaping to the woods, he decides to head south, on foot, towards Florida, hoping to reunite with his family. After another dream-filled rest, he wakes to find a man standing before him. His name is Wes, and something’s not right about him, but Erik buddies up with him nonetheless, especially after Wes informs Erik that they’re basically screwed. Wes sums it up aptly: “I don’t want to think of this as Mad Max on steroids, but it might be.” Apparently, twenty-four hours with no electricity is all it takes to send our civilization tipsy topsy turvy.

Erik’s nightly dreams return him to a fantastical realm where he’s reunited with his English-speaking cat and converses with Jesus Christ about heaven and hell and is visited by the recurring image of the white horse. Wes and Erik are intercepted by a militia group and are imprisoned in muddy pits where they are forced to stand in calf-high water that eventually gets polluted by their own excrement. But through the traumatic ordeal, they have the wherewithal to ponder the last-known weather forecast in order to try and predict how much higher the rain water will rise on them. The arid flatness of their emotional tone evokes a Beckett-like carnival of absurdity, but Jordan doesn’t fully press the pedal to yield this effect. Their caging in the underground mud pits is at once both revolting and comedic. They are soon joined by a female prisoner, Jenna, and Erik thoughtfully considers whether he’d have sex with her. PowerBars are dropped down to them through the bars, their sole food source, and they orchestrate a way to feed each other since they are each awkwardly handcuffed. They devise a plan of escape, and it succeeds, but the novella’s looming peculiarity is punctuated when, after they have run just a few...