When I outlined On the Edge of Gone, which starts minutes before a massive comet impact and chronicles the immediate aftermath, I went in with the same doom-and-gloom ideas about the apocalypse.
Pain for the victims of the Bastille Day atrocity in Nice, the dozens of dead and their bereft families; but confusion too because there was a sense of deja vu, the return of the same doom-filled atmosphere that descended on us last November, when terrorism struck in Paris, leaving 130 dead.
"Piangerò la sorte mia," Cleopatra's multifaceted lament from Handel's "Giulio Cesare," is preceded by a chromatically slashing aria by Johann Adolf Hasse for the same doomed monarch.
After this dark bit of business we cut to 20 years later, in which the same school is rather improbably reviving the same, doomed title.
It's narrated by the swamp hen herself, a small bird that's tucked into the bottom of the famous garden fresco salvaged from that same doomed metropolis.
Indeed no other writer gave me this feeling again so purely until I ran across David Foster Wallace, so many years later, and found he'd learned the very same thing; I suspect he learned it from the same doomed, messed-up, wounded, alcoholic genius of a teacher.
It's people who bought high succumbing to selling low, falling for the same doom-loop behavior Carl's sketch portrays.
The game also has the same weapons Doom fans are familiar with, including a surprisingly effective chainsaw.
Both books share the same sense of doom, the same killer details that make the reader feel as if the ground is shifting beneath them, and both of their unreliable narrators are flawed, unlikable women with disastrous relationships.
But given how infrequently franchises change hands—rarely more than a sale or two every few years one bad crop of owners in the same region can doom it to incompetence for over a decade.
