The First Five Minutes of the Apocalypse

Do you enjoy stories that do not end well for anyone involved? Do you want to inflict emotional pain and small existential crises on yourself? Yes? Excellent, read this collection.

In this book you will find a collection of well written and engaging stories that confront mortality with different scenarios and protagonists (not all of them human), this is all about the end on the most personal level and it is brilliantly executed. It made me think of the movie Melancholia where the apocalypse is a background character to the characters inner lives and to how they face their own finality, it's emotionally heavy and there's a lot of potentially triggering material (do check the trigger warnings). There were a few stories I would have wanted more from but that's just me being greedy for a good story. While I had my favorites, I can honestly say that every entry in this collection was strong, and it took me a day or two to process before I could review.

There's a wide array of apocalypses and the characters are about as diverse as you can hope for which kept the collection from getting stale. Applegate really has a knack for putting together anthologies that keep their topic fresh.

I received an eARC of this book through Booksirens and this is my honest review.