CZM Book Club: The End, Like Sand, by Margaret Killjoy

The apocalypse didn't arrive with a bang, but as a slow, uneven collapse—like grains of sand through an hourglass. In this raw, genre-blurring narrative, Margaret Killjoy recounts her own transformation from a disoriented urban dweller to a member of the Muppet Babies, a self-declared mutual aid society formed in resistance to the disintegration of society. What begins as a personal story of eviction and survival becomes a meditation on how communities rebuild not through grand ideology, but through absurdity, play, and radical inclusion. The Muppet Babies—armed with AR-15s, pastel flags, and a constitution called the 'Accord'—refuse to become a cult or warlord gang, despite their name and their war against cannibal Nazis from the suburbs. Instead, they operate on democratic principles, prioritize care over hierarchy, and believe that the future is built not by the strongest, but by those who choose to love and respect each other. The story is a fictional blueprint for collective survival, written not as a manual, but as a provocation: what if the tools for a better world aren’t in policy or technology, but in the willingness to name your group something ridiculous so you never take yourselves too seriously? Killjoy’s narrative is layered with meta-commentary: she admits she couldn’t write a conventional nonfiction essay on how to rebuild society, so she wrote a story instead. The piece is didactic, yes—but transparently so.