Waiting for the End of the World by Madison Smartt Bell

 

It’s 1982, and Clarence Dmitri Larkin is working as a photographer at Bellevue hospital in Manhattan. The job offers a painfully clear perspective on a city sick with madness, fraught with crime, and coming apart at the seams. Larkin’s curiosity soon leads to a subterranean world of all the city’s secret dangers, including domestic terrorists with a nuclear device, a serial killer inspired by an occult past, and a disfigured arsonist who just might be the one to burn the whole city down.

 

Waiting for the End of the World is a gritty portrait of 1980s New York, and an engrossing look at the battle of good versus evil in a city racked with violence and paranoia.