Adam Nemett ’03 Imagines End Days

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The book: In The Egg, an off-campus geodesic dome, David Fuffman and a ragtag crew of Princeton students train for the end of the world. With America in a state of war and climate disasters escalating, The Egg, funded by Mathias Blue and fueled by performance drugs and psychedelic enhancers, expands to college campuses across the country.

When a final superstorm arrives, the radical Princeton renegades must toe the line between good and evil.

Who is responsible for fixing our world? In his debut novel We Can Save Us All (The Unnamed Press), Adam Nemett ’03 offers a comedic, yet terrifying, look at the chaos in the world around us.

The author: Adam Nemett ’03 is an author and creative director at The History Factory. He wrote and directed the feature film The Instrument in 2005, and his worked has been published in Variety, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. He received his MFA in fiction/screenwriting from the California College of the Arts.

Opening lines: Even Hitler was on meth. Google it. Every morning, Hitler’s personal physician — Dr. Theo Morell — entered his bedroom to administer charisma intravenously: a cocktail injection of methamphetamines and morphine, plus cocaine eye drops. Adolf never asked what was in the needle and Theo never offered the secret. He simply upped the dosage until Hitler succumbed to something like Parkinson’s, something like addiction, and drowned in his own sea.

For the record, David Fuffman never assumed Mathias Blue was real — real meaning unenhanced, unadulterated — only that Mathias’ was an evolved consciousness. Though David would likely fail to comprehend the extent of Mathias’ genius, he’d be among the tawdry heroes who faked greatness, who sat at the feet of Mathias’ being and came to class. David only and infinitely believed in him. And now the power is going off and the light is leaving them, maybe forever. The tide is coming in.

They claim it’ll be the biggest flood since Noah. David envisions a giant blue wave, an emblematic tsunami ripped from a Japanese woodcut, its many crests crashing and bouncing back like a cavalry charge, galloping hooves beneath gaunt horsemen. Something quick. But here on campus, from the roof of Spinoza Field House, David thinks it looks more like a bathtub slowly filling. He can see the swell on the horizon.

Reviews: "Nemett’s refreshing and high-energy novel had the heart and moral tension of a superhero story and the growing pains of a bildungsroman” ― Publishers Weekly