Edan Lepucki’s California joins Maureen F. McHugh’s After the Apocalypse and Emily St John Mandel’ s Station Eleven in the growing list of female writers keen to tackle the chiefly male-driven topic of Armageddon (and, more particularly, its aftermath). The genre has always had its literary champions, from J.G. Ballard to Russell Hoban, but the joint appearance in 2006 of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Will Self’s The Book of Dave appears to have injected the trope with new life—albeit, in this case, of a somewhat wan and sickly nature. With its near-future backdrop and speculative trappings, California is nominally SF, though the form is mere window-dressing; Lepucki is more interested in exploring the social dynamics of life inside a cult than gritty adventures with souped-up jalopies and punk-styled marauders, an approach which comes simultaneously as a relief and a huge disappointment.

The novel centres on Frida, a 29-year-old woman living alone with her husband Cal (a diminutive both of Calvin and California, his emblematic nickname) somewhere in the American Wilderness: the post-apocalyptic wilderness, to be precise. Society has gradually collapsed over a several decades, with extreme climate change driving migrants all over the country to flee blizzards and earthquakes. Now all that’s left are isolated communities of settlers, Pirates and religious crackpots, not-so-happily co-existing as in the days of the Old West. Still, Frida and Cal are reasonably content together; they have just enough food to live on, a decent house (inherited from their oddball neighbours, who out of the blue committed suicide en masse: father, mother and two kids) and one or two random luxuries from the old world, courtesy of a travelling trader named August—an enigmatic fellow in mirrored shades, who keeps his trade route a closely-guarded secret.

Secrets of one kind or another drive much of the plot. Take Frida, for instance. In the last days of the old world, her brother Micah (wanky name, wanky guy) got himself involved with a bunch of shady subversives calling themselves The Group: a Thoreau-lovin’ gang of lefties clearly modelled on Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, voguishly updated to embrace al-Qaeda. Micah well and truly left the reservation by becoming a suicide bomber, blowing up himself and thirty victims in a shopping mall; unable to cope with the tragedy, Frida left her home town to make a new life with Cal (Micah’s former college room-mate), much to the disgust of her parents—who have come to terms with their beloved son’s act of terrorism, and feel betrayed by her inability to do the same. In the years that follow, the world continues to go to hell in a handcart: secluded Communities are established, enforcing strict Christian doctrines, and roving bands of Pirates prey on defenceless townships.

But Frida and Cal are doing okay. They’re in the middle of nowhere, with little to do all day but screw; sure, they’ve got no soap, but at least they’re safe. Until Frida realises, one day, that she’s pregnant. This changes her entire worldview, and their current stasis becomes quickly intolerable. Recklessly, she convinces the more staid Cal that they need to leave their home and explore the outer regions of their territory—more specifically, the sinister boundary known only as the Spikes, a wall of abstract totems and man-made pylons resembling modern-art sculptures devised by the Taliban. Despite his reservations Cal realises Frida’s mind is made up, so he reluctantly agrees. They reach the Spikes, and find they are arranged to form a kind of spiralling maze: at the centre of which is a small township, populated by cautiously-welcoming adults (but no children, we uneasily note). And who should turn out to be their Mysterious Leader? None other than Micah, Frida’s supposedly-dead brother—who faked his own death so he could drop off the grid, and continue his dodgy activities unobserved.

The discovery that Micah is still alive understandably knocks Frida for a loop. Micah—now known as Mikey— has set himself up as a mixture of Colonel Kurtz and Gandhi, cultivating a rather gnomic persona. Cal always felt Mikey was a dangerous character, and his sudden reappearance does nothing to dampen his suspicions; but his people certainly respect him, and with a certain trepidation Cal and Frida start to integrate with the township. Daily chores are a key part of community life, and Frida quickly flexes her culinary talents in the kitchens, while Cal attends to ditch-digging and the like. Mikey unexpectedly invites Cal to join his Inner Sanctum: the town council, in other words, whose deliberations Cal is urged to keep absolutely secret (even from his wife). Frida, meanwhile, learns a disturbing fact about Mikey: when he first showed up at the township, he gained their trust by ruthlessly killing several Pirates—and then beheading them with his knife, hanging their heads from the Spikes as a warning to the rest. How will Mikey react to Frida’s pregnancy—and why are there no other children in the town…?

Though competently formed, California is rather less than compelling. It’s not badly written; Lepucki knows how to craft a fluid sentence, and has a decent grasp of character. But the book as a whole is just too NICE, too squeakily well-behaved, to make it a credible vision of post-apocalyptic earth. The pace is somewhat languid, and the central mystery—what is Mikey’s Big Secret? —insufficiently fascinating, making the novel more of a curio than a relentless page-turner. The apocalypse itself is almost irrelevant; the plot would seem to work just as well set in a survivalist commune, or a religious sect (though Mikey’s affiliations are explicitly secular). To its credit, California doesn’t immediately evoke memories of any other specific work (though the Pirates, with their distinctive red scarves and bandido bad manners, may remind Western fans of Django and The Magnificent Seven); still, its originality lies mainly in its soap-operatic approach, hardly typical of the genre. Along with Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, California is an attempt to break free of the male-dominated agenda of most ApocFic— but, unlike the more polished “Station Eleven” (whose flu-pandemic apocalypse is not sidelined to anything like the same extent), California is only fitfully successful. The modern yardstick by which all such novels are judged must be McCarthy’s The Road, whose pared-down prose starkly evokes a bleak future world in which basic survival is the beginning and end of all human endeavour. California, by contrast, posits a very polite apocalypse, where civilised values still hold meaning, and the survivors fret about relationships, social integration and personal hygiene: none of which rings false, exactly, but does render our heroes’ concerns awfully bland. But it’s possible I’m being too hard on Ms.Lepucki. Maybe her vision of post-apocalyptic angst is spot-on: this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a needy whimper. If so, some of us are at least part-way to the finish line already.