Bunker mentality
Kashana Cauley gets inside the heads of doomsday preppers in `The Survivalists'
Doomsday preppers, or survivalists, are those who take planning for worst-case scenarios to the next level. Whether anticipating government standoffs or a zombie apocalypse, they are preparing for total societal and economic collapse. In the prepandemic era, these people were largely depicted in popular culture as paranoid loons or super-serious reality show contestants.
But anyone can potentially be radicalized into a doomsday prepper, theorizes Kashana Cauley, writer for the animated TV show “The Great North” and former staff writer for “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah.” In her first novel, “The Survivalists,” out from Soft Skull Press, Cauley explores how it might occur for a successful Black lawyer looking for love while vying for partnership at her firm in New York City.
For the main character, Aretha, the story starts with perfect dates with coffee-selling business owner Aaron. But the pressures of her work, fear of failure, lack of familial and societal safety nets and a search for meaning somehow lead Aretha down a strange path: selling guns with Aaron’s roommates, living on soy nutrition bars, huddling in bunkers and planning how to survive an apocalypse.
In humorously exploring how people make decisions that take them down a radical rabbit hole, “The Survivalists” observes how fear, driven by disasters from hurricanes to crushing debt, can swallow up who we used to be.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q Was there a moment or event that drove you to decide on doomsday preppers as the subject of your book?
A When I lived in New York City, it was a lovely, squeaky-clean environment that really didn’t seem like it warranted apocalypse prepping in any way. But I had read a couple of articles about preppers there. One couple was in the Village in a really nice house with no crime. The other couple lived on the end of my block in Prospects Heights above a ramen shop — again, no crime, nothing to really be afraid of existentially.
The reason why these news stories connected with me so much is because I grew up in Wisconsin in a house where my parents always had a stash of food. They also had guns. When I was like, “Why do you have these things?” They’d say, “You never know what will go wrong,” referring to storms or situations where you can’t really call the cops (not that we wanted to, being
Black). They just wanted to have things in case of an emergency. So this is where the story idea kind of gelled with me, and I found myself sort of obsessed with this lifestyle.
In terms of the research, I found Black survivalists online. A lot of folks love to talk about what their preparations are. I also wanted to know, how are Black people approaching prepping that might be different from, say, the Bundys? There’s a history of prepping movements in the United States, like the homesteaders and the selfsufficiency movements. I don’t want to call the Black Panthers doomsday preppers, per se, but they had this idea of selfsufficiency — a community that was kind of separate from the rest of the greater American economy. Seeing what preparedness meant to different people ended up as the background material of the book.
I think a lot of the modern prepping is very individualistic — very much just me and my bunker and my guns and my food and don’t come visit me. But a lot of the historical movements actually seem to be more community-based: We have our town where we can grow enough food for everyone. Somewhere, there was a major split — that surprised me. In the book, the preppers pretty much want to survive, but they end up trying to form a community in their house.
Q The book explores fear and the depths it can lead you to in trying to control it. Can you talk about that?
A I think a lot of us like to think that we have control over our lives to a great extent, or that we can wrest control when we don’t have any. With fear, there’s an intellectual response, and there’s an emotional, visceral response. And the emotional response is just so much less controllable than the intellectual response. You’re in these situations and you’re scared, and you feel it in your arms and your chest. That feeling can lead you to try to take control by doing things that you didn’t picture yourself doing, in order to not feel that fear again.
A little bit of that discussion is about pressure, taken from my own background as a corporate lawyer. It was an environment where you saw people get canned every year, usually around the holidays. There’s this great fear that you’re just going to end up on the chopping block the second week of December every year. Pressure was sky-high; the hours were insane. All the women I worked with at some point lost massive amounts of hair. It was not fun. I think it drove us a little bit nuts trying to succeed in this environment, both against all odds and at all costs to our sanity and to our health.
For Aretha, the fear of not succeeding along with the pressure of the day-today job turns her into this person who’s unhappy all the time. Sometimes when you’re really massively unhappy, you will do things that you may not expect yourself to do in order to prevent that feeling or to control it.
Q When people talk about doomsday preppers, they don’t always first think of Black people. But in the book, the extreme pressure and fear and the lack of fulfillment and safety nets in modern-day life are what turn Aretha into a prepper.
A So I’m Black, as are the characters in the book. We’re Americans, too. We’re just as susceptible to fear, pressure and the general American values of rugged individualism as anyone else. I do not want to generalize, but there are plenty of statistics to show that we are discriminated against more, we face more pressure in the workplace, it’s harder for us to find jobs and it’s harder for us to keep them. I think that we, as a subdemographic, experience a lot of pressure and a lot of failure. It is very scary.
Aretha’s parents are dead and she doesn’t feel like she has a safety net, while her best friend and co-workers do. It adds another level to her pressure and her fear and pushes her into things like doomsday prepping. She’s just like, well, this is something I can control. I can filter water; I can keep a supply of soy bars.
Q Hurricane Sandy was the trigger for Aaron to start going down the rabbit hole of preparedness and survivalism. Did you experience it living in New York?
A My husband and I ended up flying out and staying with his parents in our hometown so that he could take his actuarial exams in a place that wasn’t experiencing a hurricane. We didn’t get back home for four weeks. There was no power; everything was flooded.
We ended up in Chicago because his work had an office there, and I could freelance. But we were just miserable. We missed our home so badly. So yeah, Sandy was a triggering event for me. We had a plan, and we actually did escape. But yeah, hurricanes will wreck your life.
When I moved to California right before the pandemic, I put together my earthquake go-bag, which I heard you have to have here.
Q You write for TV. Did that influence anything that went into the book?
A couple of my TV jobs have had really, really big writers rooms. The nice thing about a really big writers room is it’s got a lot of different people, a lot of different working styles and a lot of different approaches. So when I sit down to write something, it’s nice to think about how somebody I worked with might approach something.
Also, three-act structure, which is very sitcomy, is a really fun way to piece together a book as well. You know what to expect with three-act structure, but there’s still room to experiment. At the same time, it tells you where to put the big dramatic points and how to structure the plot.
I very much wanted to write a dark comedy. I wanted things to constantly get worse for Aretha, and I wanted her to make decisions she was not comfortable with. But I also wanted some of those decisions to be funny. I honestly think there’s something inherently funny in thinking, I will survive this huge disaster. Out of all the people who are affected by this, I will be fine because I have done all of these things and I have a plan.
Q Is there something you’d like readers to take away from this book?
A I would want people to ask themselves, what is their relationship to fear? Are they letting fear control their lives? What are they doing in service of fear, and is it really serving them? Are they happy? I have known a lot of people who have let fear shape them into people that they don’t want to be.
In general, I like to put work out there and let people draw their own conclusions — but I think the book is maybe a good excuse for readers to reevaluate their relationship with fear.