What happens when the end itself becomes a perpetual excitement, a kind of bankable celebrity? Is it ground down into the footpowder of the quotidian? Does the pharmakon of apocalypse become a coal tar panacea? Does the millennium get lost in the paste of albums and piles of newsclippings, a file less obsessively x than why?

It would be a mistake to ignore the tackier, more saccharine, or more homiletic forms of millennial accomplishment, particularly given the widespread appeal of sensational secular journalism, assessed here by Amelia Carr, and the series of Protestant Left Behind books studied by Tom Doyle. In Part IV, we contend with dis/tended time, which in Eurasian fictions has regularly been conditioned by a critical dystopianism, but which in American popular fictions has been rather disingenuous or preachy-keen. As Amelia Carr shows, the illustrated covers and stories in the Weekly World News and Sun feast upon prophecy, heedless of indigestion or bloat, with little point other than marvel, little meaning other than urgency. Tautology is hard at work in the tabloids, where the medium is nothing more nor less than (in a distilled but still spiritualist sense) the medium, revealing other worlds threaded through our own, familiarly strange and strangely hopeful. Apocalypse and millennium are datelines, their chronologies tissue-thin, their hells and heavens destinations for exotic vacations. And each week there will be more of the same, an old news. Or, as in contemporary Christian science fictions, evangel.