So…what now?

Apocalypse Child: Surviving Doomsday and the Search for Identity at the End of the World
by Carly Butler

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2024
$24.95  /  9781773861326

Reviewed by Valerie Green

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Apocalypse Child is an unimaginable story that would be difficult to believe unless you knew that author Carly Butler had actually lived it and is now generously sharing her story with readers.

Butler begins the book with the words: “This is a true story that explores mature themes of sexuality, racism, abuse, language, pregnancy loss, medical peril and the death of a child, as well as over-all religious trauma. Please read with care.”

As a child living in wilderness, she was taught to embrace her mother’s strange conspiracy theories about the coming of the end of the world. As an adult, she was forced to accept that the Apocalypse did not in fact happen as her mother predicted and she must then learn survival skills in a world about which she had had no knowledge.

It is a compelling memoir of a woman who had a strange upbringing. While reading it, you will experience the trauma of the author’s compelling journey since childhood.

Carly was raised in 1990s Montana by DJ, a strong, single mother. Her father was never discussed during her early years. Together mother and daughter lived a relatively normal life for a few years with an evangelical religion as their basis. Carly’s mother appeared to have money from an inheritance and worked on house renovation projects while also bringing her musical talent to their local church.

Along the way Carly made some friends around her own age, but they were from families of similar beliefs. She witnessed the death of one of them in a swimming pool. “In the days that followed,” Butler writes,

I replayed everything in my mind, trying to think if I could have changed the outcome by doing something different……And still I wondered: In an emergency, in a life-or-death situation, was I capable of saving anyone? Was this God’s will or was I a weak link, a soft spot for Death and the Devil to have their way, knowing they could get away with it? It turns out that even when you watch one of your friends drown in front of you in August, you must still go back to school in September.

However, as the year 2000 drew nearer DJ’s beliefs about the world ending and the need to be prepared grew to unrealistic proportions. That was the year when she feared that the dreaded Y2K would destroy the world as we knew it and they would need to learn survival skills if they were able to live in a new world. So, when Carly was barely nine years old, she and her mother illegally crossed the border into Canada and settled in British Columbia’s wilderness to prepare for the end.

It was there that Carly learnt basic survival skills: to live without electricity, to ration their food, and to shoot bottles for target practice if they needed to protect themselves. They connected with other Evangelical Christians who were also preparing for Doomsday.

It was there that Carly Butler came of age with no one to help her experience a normal life with other teenagers and to learn about her own sexuality. Her mother’s paranoia about Y2K was destroyed when the world did not in fact end in the year 2000, but her beliefs were reinforced again in 2001, on September 11, when the twin towers were attacked in New York. Her mother decided that God had slightly miscalculated the year, but the end was still coming and 9/11 was just the beginning. Butler also finally found the truth about her father and her mother’s past life and even had a brief relationship with her dad, but it didn’t last and simply confused her even more.

As the years went by, and the world didn’t end, Carly slowly managed to exist in adulthood without any identification papers to enable her to work. To all intents and purposes, she and her mother did not exist as they were illegal immigrants, but her community of other “believers” helped her to get around the law. The Apocalypse child was forced to slowly become a woman in a world she did not understand.

Butler’s story is riveting and very powerful as she describes being different from everyone else while trying to find her true self. Her earlier skills were of little use. She had been home-schooled by her mother for years and had no documentation of having graduated. Lack of proper health care during her early years caused considerable problems for her in adulthood, including difficult pregnancies. She had been indoctrinated into a religion that believed the world would end so there was no point in looking to the future.

Butler’s lack of knowledge about the essentials of living a normal life was paramount. But, eventually, with determination, hard work and making herself ‘legal’, she was able to accept herself for what she is today—a bisexual Indigenous woman with ancestral roots in Mexico.

Carly Butler has been many things during her unusual life— a house cleaner, a barista, and a birth doula, and now an author. She is currently a stay-at-home-disability-mom to her two children. She lives with her understanding husband in Langley, BC. Apocalypse Child is her first book, but with her untapped talent for writing I am sure it will not be her last.

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Valerie Green was born and educated in England, where she studied journalism and law. Her passion was always writing from the moment she first held a pen. After working at the world-famous Foyles Books in London (followed by a brief stint with MI5 and legal firms), she moved to Canada in 1968 and embarked on a long career as a freelance writer, columnist, and author of over twenty nonfiction historical and true-crime books. Hancock House recently released Tomorrow, the final volume of The McBride Chronicles (after Providence, Destiny, and Legacy). Now semi-retired (although writers never really retire!) she enjoys taking short road trips around BC with her husband, watching their two beloved grandsons grow up and, of course, writing. [Editor’s note: Valerie Green has reviewed Daniel Kalla, John Delacourt, Laurel Dykstra, Andrea Warner, J.T. Siemens, and Russel Barrie for The British Columbia Review.]