"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn't ben none for a long time befor him and nor I aint looking to see none agen. He didn't make the ground shake or nothing like that when he come on my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the rqwyrt he ternt and stood and clatter his teef and made his rush and there we were then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.'"

Told in a completely phonetic post-apocalyptic cockney narrative Riddley Walker takes place in southern England a few hundred years after a nuclear holocaust. Riddley Walker himself is a young boy who gets caught up in a cultural war between hunter-gatherers, farmers, and their primitive government that uses puppet shows to promote their agendas. A pivotal part of the story, the puppet shows depict the days just before the collapse and ultimately encourages people to begin pursuing the knowledge that will once again lead to their destruction. Contrasting the puppet shows are a series of myths told by hunter gatherer story tellers, beautiful and strange explanations of how humans learned to hunt (they were taught by a dog, but in Riddley Walker's time dogs brutally hunt humans) and what they did to survive after the world biosphere was destroyed (cannibalism). Humanity is poised to begin the advance again, due to a dwindling wilderness and the accelerating displacement of animistic culture by the messianic cult of Eusa (the mythical creator of the atomic bomb). From an anti-civilizationist or anarchist perspective this book provides insight on what the world may look like thirty generations from now, as our own ancestors try to rebuild, or prevent the rebuilding of our culture, known to them only by the presence of artifacts that never decay. Not only that but this book speaks to the way the myths of any culture shape it and its collective goals. Do we live as a part of this earth or seek after some ultimately unattainable holy grail of knowledge at the cost of our connection to ourselves and the world around us? The book shows very simply the steps humans take towards civilization and their terrible costs.

Check your local bookstore.