A Short History of the Apocalypse

by Frankie Boyle, Charlie Skelton

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

*A Short History of the Apocalypse: your comprehensive guide to the challenges of Armageddon*

Join Frankie Boyle (Saturday Night Swindle; Celebrity Vengeance) and Charlie Skelton (head writer: Ad Naseum; David Suchet's News Sachet) as they debrief time traveller and bon vivant from the late 21st Century, Alonso Lampe.

Will humanity survive the coming cataclysm? Find out inside, along with helpful tips on cannibalism, thunderdome etiquette, and post-societal dating.

How do you go about joining a militia?
What will life be like in a billionaire's bunker?
How will people entertain themselves in re-education camps?

All these questions will be fully and satisfactorily answered.

With exclusive illustrations by Hall of Fame comic artist Frank Quitely, A Short History of the Apocalypse is vital to your future survival.

Release date: November 7, 2024

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 560

Sample

This is an abridged and heavily redacted translation of the original 7,000-page manuscript, entitled La Desagradable Historia del Apocalipsis, which was discovered by an employee of Hammersmith & Fulham Borough Council, tightly bound up in a Jiffy bag, in a temporary septic tank on Shepherd’s Bush Green. Suspecting it might be drug money, he fished it out, unsealed it, and apart from a few chapters which fell out from the middle of the sheaf into the ordure and were lost, he saved the bulk of the manuscript, and took it to the council portacabin – where for a few weeks it was used for mopping up spillages and wiping boots – until a Spanish-speaking colleague happened to examine a few passages, and without delay passed the remainder of the manuscript to the council’s hate-crime unit.

Several pages, and the entire chapter concerning the future of Singapore, were removed from the manuscript at this point, and held as evidence in the event of the authors being found and prosecuted. Attempts to contact the authors failed, but the manuscript eventually found its way to Mr Boyle’s agent, by whom I was engaged to translate the remaining text, and at whose insistence I later removed all of the references to Mr Boyle’s behaviour at the All Star Lanes bowling alley at the Westfield shopping centre. These I would be happy to make available, for a small handling fee, to any interested scholars of the apocalypse or researchers into public urination.

Damage to the manuscript means that there are numerous large and disorienting gaps in the dialogue and narrative, which seem to fit well with the consistently confused nature of the document. Some pages I found to be almost completely without meaning, which made them much easier to translate. I have endeavoured to retain the idiosyncrasies of the text, but have deleted something in the region of 30,000 exclamation marks, a type of punctuation of which the authors seem particularly fond, a great many appearing upside down, in the Spanish fashion. Often five or six would occur in the middle of a sentence in square brackets, usually a mixture of the two orientations, thus: [!¡!!¡], but generally they were peppered throughout, seemingly at random, sometimes two or three within an individual word, and their inclusion would be unhelpful to the casual reader. Also, I have chosen not to include the constant use of the expression ‘¡Tienes cojones!’ with which the protagonist, Alonso Lampe, seems to begin and end most things that he says; and which the authors, to an extent that must be considered unrealistic, pepper the reported speech of most people they meet, including dozens of non-Spanish-speaking historical figures.

As far as I can tell, the majority of the conversations between Mr Lampe and the authors were conducted in Spanish. I understand that both authors are fairly proficient in the language: Mr Boyle from his time as host of ¡Eventos Locos! – an online ‘bloopers’ show aimed at the Mexican market, featuring hostage-situation mishaps caught on Tijuana police bodycam footage, which ran for most of the duration of Covid; and Mr Skelton from the year he spent before university as a cage dancer aboard a Barcelona party boat – which perhaps explains his abundant use of the exclamation ‘¡No tocar!’ (no touching), but this might also have something to do with Mr Lampe’s radically different understanding of personal space. Mr Lampe himself appears to be bilingual in Spanish and English but fluent in neither.

I have not had access to any of the voice recordings made by the authors of their conversations with Mr Lampe, except for a phone message provided by Boyle’s agent in which a person with a thick Gibraltarian accent can be heard singing something in the background which, upon analysis, turned out to be lyrics from the song ‘Circo Loco’ by Drake, seemingly altered to be about the singer’s forthcoming bunion surgery, his tone both playful and threatening. Boyle seems nervous during the message, and at one point there’s some kind of scuffle during which Skelton can be heard to yell ‘¡Este no es el futuro!’ I forwarded the message to a colleague in the Department of Comparative Linguistics, in an attempt to pin down what decade of the future Mr Lampe’s particular brand of Spanish might have emerged in. I forwarded the message to a colleague and they were unable to help, instead passing on the message to the Deputy Vice Chancellor, with whom I am currently having fruitful discussions about the University of Glasgow’s internal communications policy. However, it seems reasonable to speculate, on the basis of other things shouted during the scuffle, that Mr Lampe learned his Spanish at some point after the period referred to in the text as The Conflagration of Decency.

Mr Lampe’s post-apocalyptic Spanish has, understandably, undergone a series of significant morphological shifts, and seems to rely heavily on a semantic architecture constructed from the brand names of various mid-price sherries. For reasons of coherence, I have removed several pages of transcribed dialogue in which he and the authors are trying and failing to fix on the meaning of a word, most often a body part. Where I have been unable to comprehend something said by Mr Lampe, I have made an educated guess. I’ve done my best to improve the stories told by Mr Lampe of his time spent navigating the apocalypse, but many are beyond repair, and these I have left untouched. His rambling and incoherent comparisons between white Rioja and Tempranillo Blanco, which occur during most conversations, have been condensed and moved to Appendix 4, which has been deleted. Some chapters I’ve rewritten entirely, as they just weren’t very engaging, and much of the second half of the book is entirely my invention, but such are the liberties a translator must take in order to be true to the spirit of a text.

Dr Yoana Azurmendi

University of Glasgow, 2024

What you are about to start reading and then give up on in a few minutes is an account of the grisly ruins of human civilisation from one who walked among them, many decades from now, and who journeyed back to our time, at no small personal cost – particularly to those he met here – to warn us of the horrors that await. It describes, in unblenching detail, a sickening blizzard of crimes, immoralities and blasphemies carried out by governments and corporations, monarchies, celebrities, bodyguards, billionaires, and your future self. Though often distressing, and frequently dull, everything in this book is serious, important and true. Nothing in this book is for entertainment purposes only, or at all. If at any point you find yourself being entertained, something has gone gravely wrong, and you should start again at the beginning, ideally with a fresh copy.

You do not have to believe everything this book tells you, but one day you will, even if this is your dying thought: damn them to hell, they were right. And die you might. For though this book offers vital protection against a future that will do its best to destroy you, we cannot claim that it will save your life. All that we humbly claim is that it will save mankind. We will explain later how this is so – it is a little complex, the explanation would take us to the very outer reaches of science and philosophy, and indeed beyond them, to a place philosophers call ‘beyond philosophy’. No sense can be made of the book itself without a close preparatory study of the Monadology of Leibniz, and there is little point in reading it at all unless you have the Hebrew text of Jeremiah’s Lamentations to hand, so bear that in mind. Much of what it contains is so philosophically dense, that – as Gurdjieff said in the ‘friendly advice’ he gave at the outset of his Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson – to understand it at all will require three readings. Any attempt to criticise this work after just one or two readings will be doomed, and any review based on fewer than three readings is utterly irrelevant unless good, so probably irrelevant.

As should already be obvious, even to the inattentive, our guiding light in writing this book has been Jean-Baptiste Biot’s magisterial Précis de l’Histoire de l’Astronomie Chinoise. Besides Biot’s masterpiece, the predominant models for this book are: the Upadeśasāhasrī of Adi Shankara; Hume’s History of England (especially vol.3); Edith Wharton’s A Motor-Flight Through France; Plato’s Phaedrus; and Nikki Giovanni’s poem responding to the Virginia Tech massacre: ‘We will prevail!’

We would urge anyone hoping to read this book to acquaint themselves with these works first to avoid wasting time, and perhaps just read them instead. Should you then decide to embark upon reading this book, you should never attempt more than 80 or 100 words at a single sitting – which is something we probably should have mentioned earlier – always stay hydrated, and if you are able, perform a few preparatory yoga positions each time before opening the text; we recommend going from a downward-facing pigeon via a side plank into a wind-relieving pose, followed by a minimum of 15 minutes on a trampette. Doing anything less than this is, quite frankly, a danger to your physical and mental wellbeing, and you’ve got quite enough mental and physical danger heading your way without adding to it now.

We must stress: although this book offers you advice, you are under no obligation to follow it, and if you do (which you definitely should) we take no responsibility, moral or legal, for what happens as a result. All we will accept is your gratitude, whether it’s a dying whisper of ‘thank you’, or a firm handshake on a pile of rubble and skulls amid the smoking ruins of civilisation, followed by a cry of ‘onwards!’ as we leap into the bloody ruckus, occasionally stabbing each other by accident, but never holding a grudge, and growing in trust with each new battle fought. The ribbons of our blood-spattered clothes hanging off us like the flags of a new country, the motto of which is the spirit in which you must read this book: credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is true.

The truth can be a bitter pill – hard to swallow, and tough to digest – so maybe, on reflection, it’s best used as a suppository. As vast and misshapen as the truths contained in the following chapters may be, they will better nourish and protect the reader if they are administered in the correct way. So, settle down in a comfortable chair, take a deep breath, and shove the book up your arse.

Although everything in this book is completely true, almost none of it is verifiable. It cannot be verified, because it hasn’t yet happened, and God willing it never shall, although in some sense it already has. Or rather, it will have happened, but hopefully, thanks to us, it won’t. If you are feeling confused, that’s okay. What you are sensing is your old, ignorant self melting away. Relax, and feel yourself grow. And remember, you cannot get truths this enormous inside you without some initial discomfort – that’s natural.

If, when reading this, you happen to be a lawyer employed by Microsoft or the Duke of York or Virgin Galactic, please remember: none of the foul deeds recounted herein have yet been done: the apocalypse in which these atrocities occur has yet to unfold, and nothing should be imputed to the pre-apocalyptic incarnations of these future monsters. For example, when we recount the brutalities of the elderly Zendaya, actress turned mercenary, who ended up head of the entire Disney Child Army, her wrongdoings in the post-apocalyptic future cannot be attributed to the current delightful Zendaya we know and love from various films and things, nor should they be thought of as reflecting negatively on the Walt Disney Company or any of its subsidiaries, such as the Walt Disney Child Army, which doesn’t exist yet, thank God.

We do accept that today’s Zendaya may well be embarrassed, hopefully even ashamed to hear what Colonel Zendaya gets up to later this century, but our responsibility to share what we’ve been told about the coming carnage is too great to spare her blushes. It was also, we should note, extremely upsetting for Frankie to hear details of Zendaya’s atrocities as he’d only just discovered that he would become romantically entangled with Zendaya in the early 2030s – with Zendaya’s ex, the actor Tom Holland, occasionally joining them on holiday for a surprisingly relaxed and fulfilling ménage à trois.

Would he still be able to have an intense, sexually exploratory two-year relationship with Zendaya knowing what she ends up doing? He thinks probably, yes, but said he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it. Indeed, he actually said he’ll cross that bridge when he comes on it, suggesting that his mind is at least partly made up. Alonso, our friend from the future, was relieved to hear this, as the product of Frankie, Zendaya and Tom Holland’s union is a boy child he refers to mysteriously as ‘the Sigil’, and every time he says the name, he makes a slow clasping and unclasping gesture with his left hand, which became annoying after a while. When Charlie asked what he’d be doing in the early 2030s, the time traveller made an occult shrugging gesture, and walked off, probably to suggest that it would be something important.

Please note, we’ve been obliged to change a few of the names. These include: some of the people we know professionally; some of the productions we have worked on; and a few people we met during the challenging process of writing this book. For example, ‘Greg Welensky’ is in fact Gary Welensky, and the location of Alonso’s great epiphany about his mission took place in the car park of Majestic Wine on Goldhawk Road but we changed this to the hedge at the end of Brackenbury Gardens, a few hundred metres away, because it seemed more likely, in terms of the social mores of our day, that Alonso would perform those kinds of actions under a hedge, rather than in full view of traffic. Also, we are still in a dispute with Majestic Wine about damages to two of their trolleys, referred to as Trolley A and Trolley B in court documents.

In our description of the Brackenbury Gardens hedge incident we have, under advisement, changed the names of these wine trollies to Trolley C and Trolley D, and have been careful not to imply that the ‘Trolley G’ mentioned in the account of the incident was Greg Welensky (Gary Welensky). Nor when we describe the scuffle, and how, towards the end of it, Trolley G ‘loses a wheel’, should anything we say be taken to mean that what was lost by Trolley G was anything other than a wheel, because these are ongoing proceedings and anyone speculating about it risks prosecution for contempt of testicle.

The names of the many restaurants, buffets and shopping malls in which our discussions with Alonso took place remain unchanged, nor did we change the name of Alonso Lampe himself, the entirely reliable source of much of the information you are about to absorb – although ‘Alonso Lampe’ is not how he pronounces it. None of the moods, footwear, causes of death, hair colour or beats per minute have been changed. None of the names of people who have not yet been born have been altered, unless of course we incidentally happen to change them by changing the future, which is a distinct possibility. And of course, we kept intact our own names, although a couple of times in the text we swap them back and forth, or assign them to other people and places. These instances, which always occur while we are talking about other things, are not highlighted.

Finally, we are legally obligated to insist you do not, under any circumstances, read this book, and to inform you we ourselves have not read it, and that for VAT purposes it constitutes a piece of plant machinery.

Frankie Boyle & Charlie Skelton

Congratulations. You hold in your hands a remarkable book, and you can count yourself fortunate to have stolen it. Caged within its creaking, workaday prose like a doomed lobster is the key to your future and to humanity’s survival on this godforsaken planet. As a work of literature, it is worthless. Only at a few points here and there does it rise to the level of mediocrity; for the most part, let us not mince words (the matters dealt with in this book are far too consequential for dishonesty or posturing) it is just plain maximal scheisse. Barely has it begun, yet already you can sense a clumsiness of style and paucity of imagination that, in other circumstances, would have you flinging it to the pavement like a disappointing book.

You may already have flung it down dejectedly, and turned on your heel to go back into the bookshop to steal that Åsa Larsson thriller that you nearly took instead. ‘A body found in a freezer at the home of the deceased alcoholic, Henry Pekkari, has been identified as a man who disappeared without a trace in 1962: the father of Swedish Olympic boxing champion Börje Ström.’ You can’t argue with a set-up like that, and we understand your decision, but we urge you, for the sake of civilisation: turn back on your heel a second time, and go and pick this book up from where you flung it, and if someone else has picked it up and is reading these words instead of you, snatch it away, and if they show any reluctance to relinquish it, don’t hesitate – elbow them in the throat, or deliver a crisp punch to the solar plexus and bring your knee up into their face as their legs give way. Look at them there, gasping and spluttering. They don’t even deserve to read this book. But not so fast! You, our new reader, who picked it up from the pavement and who’s been reading these words, have been forewarned: adroitly parry the blow and with the flat of your hand strike upwards at the book snatcher’s nose with all your strength and kick sideways at their kneecap – discovering too late that you, our initial reader, knowing what they would try, ducked beneath the punch, took a half-step back to avoid the kick, and have launched yourself forwards, using your head as a battering ram, knocking the wind out of reader #2, who still manages to get a thumb into your windpipe, but finds your throat braced for the assault.

The two of you are evenly forewarned. As you tumble thrashing to the pavement, trading bites and blows, your hissed insults turn to grunts of admiration and after a couple of minutes of scuffling you roll apart, look each other in the bruised eye, and smile – you have found your first comrade for the horror that awaits you both. Shake hands, tend to each other’s wounds, kiss a little if you feel so moved, and then settle down next to each other companionably on the pavement to read on.

Maybe take turns reading out loud, while the listener gently strokes the reader’s hair – secure in the knowledge that however bad this book gets, neither one of you will ever think of flinging it aside again. The pair of you have been granted a glimpse of its immense value, which will be one of the many things you’ll be soon whispering about, along with personal details, likes and dislikes, and secrets about your past that you’d almost forgotten but now seem perfectly natural to share.

However bad it gets – and yes, make no mistake, it will get pretty awful – remember that the immense value of this book has nothing to do with its constant inelegance.

Repetitive, tonally confused, hampered by authorial incompetence, paucity of imagination, and shoddy editing that Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man, when eviscerating the prose of Edmund Burke. Dull, confused, repetitive, hackneyed, self-contradictory, but never repetitive or dull, although sometimes confused: even this description of how uninspiring it is is uninspiring. We’d love to be able to tell you that having the word ‘is’ twice together in that last sentence was the low point stylistically of the whole book, but we can’t. Well, of course we could, we could tell you anything we wanted, but the one thing that this book definitely is, is truthful.

Truth in literature is a quality which has been derided since the 1960s when the French started writing about it. It will probably come as no great surprise as you read on to learn that the pernicious influence of French attitudes and ideas led directly to the collapse of civilisation and the death of billions, probably yourself included, but it may at least comfort you to discover that the French nation and its people fare peculiarly badly in the catastrophe they did so much to create. How do we know this? Is this, you are wondering, not merely wishful thinking? No, it is a happy fact. And happiness is in short supply in the years following the apocalypse, so make the most of it.

All survival experts agree that if you wish to maximise your chances of making it through a disaster alive, your best bet is to visualise the incident and plan your escape in advance, so that when catastrophe strikes – whether it’s a flash flood or a tractor flip, a pilgrimage stampede or a zoo horror – you’re not paralysed by uncertainty, but instead can calmly and successfully extricate yourself from the jaws of annihilation. This is why zoos advise all visitors to practise kicking a penguin before getting anywhere near the penguin pool, and why airlines provide you with that laminated information card in the seat pocket in front of you: it’s so that in the event of a crash it can fuse to your face and make identifying your remains less distressing for your relatives, and provide them with a clue to your final thoughts in the expression immortalised in your molten death mask.

Hope for the best, they say, but prepare for the worst. We hope this book helps prepare you for the worst, but part of what you should be prepared for is that it probably won’t. Most of you reading this will not survive the coming apocalypse. You and your friends and loved ones will perish in thousands of bizarre and harrowing ways, the unpleasant details of which we will not linger on, you may rest assured, except when we do, periodically, throughout the text. Yet the fact that you are reading these words gives you, at least, a fighting chance. Arm yourself with the knowledge of the facts laid out in this agonising account of death, failure, carpentry, exploitation, cannibalism, famine and despair – write comments in the margin or in a separate notebook if it helps, make voice notes on your phone, set aside all other work you think you’re ‘meant’ to be doing, tattoo key passages onto your legs and chest, cut yourself off from your friends and family if you have to, because by attending seriously to this book you take an active part in your own salvation, and by ignoring it, or treating it as trivial or false, you jeopardise the deliverance it offers you and deserve every horror that is about to engulf you unpleasantly.

We are all trapped, to use a phrase coined by the actor and Frankie’s bodybuilding mentor, Lou Ferrigno, on ‘spaceship earth’, and that crumpling sound you can hear is the spaceship crumpling, but this book is humanity’s escape pod, and has the marvellous advantage over other lesser spaceship escape pods of not having Richard Branson in it. We mean, of course, he’s not literally inside it. He’s mentioned in it a lot though, probably more than anyone else. We hope this isn’t a problem for you, but we think it’s better to be honest now and manage your expectations. If you genuinely thought, even for a moment, that Sir Richard Branson is literally inside this book then you are fortunate in possessing the kind of detachment from reality that will be an invaluable tool when traversing the apocalypse. In fact, any kind of psychotic dissociation you can instil in yourself now will pay you back handsomely when civilisation hits the fan, and at the back of the book you will find a handy appendix of quick and effective trauma-based reprogramming exercises that will help you unanchor your consciousness at will for no more than the cost of a crème brûlée butane torch.

In bringing you all of these useful tips and momentous data, we do not see ourselves as heroes, even though we obviously are. And though it will bring relief from despair, we do not expect, like the prostitutes of the Titanic, to be honoured by a speech from the King at Whores’ Corner in Putney, nor by the minting of a memorial sixpence. Just knowing that we are the saviours of mankind, and having everyone also acknowledge it, is enough.

Likewise, to classify this book as a sacred text would be understandable, but to do it a miserable disservice. For there is nothing otherworldly about its advice on how to survive the apocalypse: it is rigorously practical and factual, dealing in gritty, down-to-earth realities, albeit future ones. It is perhaps best thought of as a survival handbook, indeed a couple of chapters have been added purely for weight, so that in an emergency you can kill someone with it.

We are immensely proud of this book, even though, as will become clear, most of it we didn’t actually write. We wrote this bit, and suggested some wording for the back cover which was ignored, but the main body of the text we merely transcribed, so if it contains any errors, we are not to be held responsible, although we know that it doesn’t, because it is all true. And important. More important than anything that has or will ever be printed, outside of the Qur’an, and some of the key exegetical literature about the Qur’an.

In the coming apocalypse, this book will render all others (apart from the Qur’an) utterly obsolete; useless except as fuel, bra stuffing or haemostatic dressings after a knife fight. It contains information and advice of a quite extraordinary nature, the nature of which will shock you if you are not already dead. Assuming you are still alive, and doing your best to enjoy the final few moments of relative calm before the ultimate havoc (‘the prepocalypse’, as these rearmost years of civilisation became known) your enjoyment is very likely shadowed at every turn by sinister forebodings and gnawing dread, as you labour vainly to stifle your awareness of the appalling sticky wicket on which humanity finds itself.

Now is not the time to mince words: humankind is in a right old pickle. Of course, people have been in pickles before, and on a variety of sticky wickets, many of them dreadful, and a few of them enormous, far bigger and stickier than any actual pickle, but not since the mad scrabble of the hominids to gain a foothold on the planet has the self-same ghastly pickle contained us all. Even so, there is a crucial difference between the all-encompassing wicket (or ‘pickle’) of today and the sticky plight of a hundred thousand years ago: however grim it must have seemed to our dirty ancestors, huddling and guffing in the half-light, encircled by sabre-tooth tigers and other predatory therapsids (that’s the correct term, we looked it up), their determination to survive and copulate was unencumbered by despair. They copulated with a kind of wild optimism, roaring delightedly as each new position and sex act was invented, forgotten, reinvented, and eventually codified and recorded on the cave wall using an elaborate system of painted hand prints and bison drawings.

That spirit of inventiveness has long since vanished – the last person to do anything truly new in the field of sex was Dodi Fayed, and it cost three people their lives. These days, it’s virtually impossible to copulate at all without a cloud of hopelessness hovering over the sad act like a suicide drone, either ruining or improving it, depending upon your tastes. Indeed, the darker the cloud, the harder we copulate – as anyone who’s ever had to comfort someone in a crematorium lavatory can attest. But even with pharmaceutical support there’s only so many hours per day we can distract ourselves from planetary doom with copulation. Seven seems to be some sort of natural upper limit to anyone who isn’t a competitive cyclist. And even then, when each anxietyplagued bout is done, and we sprawl exhausted onto the unforgiving tarmac of our driveways, one question is screamed into the air by us all: What shall we do?

‘Your duty,’ says Immanuel Kant, ushering us back into the house, but that’s no use at all. The universality of reason, by which we might determine that duty, and which for Kant seemed an immutable fact of human life, has been barged off its philosophical perch by a great post-Enlightenment flourishing of insanity. The annihilation that beckons to us from its caravan window has driven us, by and large, mad. None madder than our so-called ‘elites’, who are attempting to dodge the inevitable by building escape pods to Mars, tunnelling like lunatics under mountains and merging with machines, all the while haunted by the futility of their schemes, none of which is going to work, or even fail in an amusing way.

We speak here of inevitability, but are we truly doomed? Is the coming catastrophe unavoidable? And if it is, then is it survivable? Until now, questions like these were basically unanswerable, no matter how many terrible podcasts tried to address them. But with this book comes an answer to the question: What shall we do? Stop copulating for a moment, untie everybody, clean yourself up, and read this book. Nothing else matters. Except the Qur’an.

Though prepared somewhat by the ups and downs of TV entertainment, we still found it quite a surprise when we were visited by a time traveller from the apocalypse, and learned that he had chosen us, out of billions alive in our cursed age, to be