Death and the Apocalypse

The author uses this theme as a means of exploring her characters' fears, anxieties, and regrets, many of which revolve around death and the end of the world. Several of the characters express a generalized form of anxiety that cycles through various subjects before landing on the worst possible scenarios. The narrator of “Ghosts and Empties,” for example, takes nightly walks through her neighborhood to expend her anxious energy, and it is no wonder she feels this way, as she states, “I can't stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious” (7). The main character of “Flower Hunters” dwells on these same terrifying thoughts, and notes this as the reason for her friend Meg's sudden exit from...