Michele Wucker is the author of Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (Hill & Wang, 1999). Visit her Web site at: http://wucker.com.

A review of Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America by Alex Heard W.W. Norton & Company, $25, 360 pages

Sprawling across the floor of my old high-school library is a giant stone clock, its hands set at 10:59 -- a warning from the building's original owners that the end was nigh. It wasn't, which was how the high school ended up there. After the world failed to end in 1959, the apocalyptic group splintered and sold its land and buildings, cheap. Too bad they did not know that most such movements either avoid specific dates for the Second Coming, or else set timetables not to be taken any more seriously than the weather forecast. I learned this helpful bit of trivia in Alex Heard's Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America, a light-spirited romp through millennial and utopian movements.

Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America

It's the end of the world, and they know it

With the calendar about to flip all four digits at once, it is a timely book. If the number of weird people in this book is any indicator, the odds are good that there might just be believers among the folks next door. Which raises the questions: How do you tell the difference between a kitsch klatsch and a dangerous militia? What will conspiracy theorists do if the Year 2000 bug does not turn out to part of a millennial plot of doom? And, gulp, what if they are right?

Heard, an editor at Wired magazine, infiltrates all kinds of groups: fringe scientists, New Agers, libertarians, vitamin poppers and perpetual motion inventors. He is an entertaining tour companion who alternates sympathy with disbelief. At times he is a wiseacre; at others, self-deprecating. Unfortunately, whenever he starts to get at what we really ought to make of his subjects, he drops hints but goes for the joke instead.

"My opinion is: Who Knows?" is a typical out. That is too bad, because this is sparkling reportage that is pugnaciously attained, wittily written and sprinkled with insights -- even if it does take some excavating to find them. Heard's world is one of perennial outsiders on a great quest, with a large dose of narcissism thrown in for self-therapy ("the Four Horsemen of the Inner Child"), appeasing guilt for the world's sins or simply for their own failures, and above all hope.

If he emphasizes one thing, it is that most of these movements are harmless. That was certainly true of most of the members of the Davidians, the group that built the clock in my high school and the tunnels below campus. We saw them as eccentric, but sweet older people who visited and babbled about the days when they were married in our study hall. We were wrong. That was because we did not know much about the imminent real apocalypse of their radical branch faction in a new complex a half-hour or so away. I should probably mention that I went to school in Waco, Texas.

Saving the world from evil

The Branch Davidians were not harmless. Nor do they quite fit into Heard's theories, such as they are, about the benign nature of apocalyptic groups -- unless it is that their big mistake started with their failure to come up with a rain date for the end of the world. They inspired Ron Cole, a young man who Heard writes about. Cole wears an old David Koresh T-shirt reading "God Rocks" and leads the Colorado 1st Light Infantry (of which he is the only member) and the North American Liberation Army. He moves to Waco and stockpiles arms until the FBI arrests him. Apart from his violent leanings, however, Cole shares something important with Heard's millennial stable: a deep yearning and a sense of narcissism.

These people feel that they are chosen for a great task, which is often to prepare the world for a savior. Some are even reincarnated as powerful angels, like Ruth Norman, a.k.a. the Archangel Uriel, founder of the Unarius Academy of Science. Members place their hopes on a spaceship bearing angelic brothers who will save the world when they arrive in 1976 -- er, well, 2001 -- or maybe just eventually. In the meantime, Unarians use recovered-memory techniques in their quest for "progressive evolution" toward the perfect human self.

Despite Heard's rich detail, his utopians and millennialists start to sound the same. You could almost interchange the words of the Presider of the New Island Creation Consortium, the Mississippi Christian and the Orthodox rabbi trying to breed the perfect sacrificial red cow for the Third Temple of Jerusalem, the "Trapper John, ET" physician leading UFO expeditions, the man who drags a giant crucifix around the world, or the author of If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive. Their guiding principles boil down to an extreme mix of pop psychology and religion.

These people appear to be obsessed with the familiar, age-old struggle of Good vs. Evil. Evil is "the essential millennial and dystopian narrative that sees a dark force blocking our path to our enlightenment," Heard writes. Millennialists also want badly to believe in a higher power that wants to redeem earthlings for their awful doings. This makes sense considering their deep roots in more familiar religions: Scholars count between 16 and 70 Jewish apocalypses, not to mention the Book of Revelation and, recently, the Puritans, Millerites, Pentecostalists and Mormons. In other words, millennialists have highly creative ways of seeking divine guidance. The want to believe that they have been chosen to fend off Evil.

Terrible enjoyment

"It's just nice to receive secret spiritual commands," Heard notes about Earth Changes, which maintains that Mother Earth is angry at humans but that it receives signs of how to appease her. Its founder, "sleeping prophet" Edgar Cayce, had visions of coming destruction, although he frequently re-calibrated his prophecies because Mother Earth keeps standing them up (Atlantis will rise in 1968-69; Mount Rainier will erupt in 1994 or 1995). His followers shrug off the mistakes.

This time Heard does not shirk at explaining why: "It's a way of living on the edge of apocalypse forever, and never losing the twin thrills -- the pain of impending disaster, the anticipatory joy of ultimate redemption -- that can make millennialism terrible and enjoyable at the same time."