bunker

Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn’t take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere.

In Bunker, I explore the global and rapidly growing movement of ‘prepping’ for social and environmental collapse, or ‘Doomsday’. From the ‘dread merchants’ hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is an exciting and deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus.

The bunker is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, I show, it’s in our minds.

“Bunker is an extraordinary achievement; a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege, and apocalypse told through the space of the bunker. Garrett has written a gripping, grim, witty work of geography and ethnography, which he completed—with eerie timeliness—in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic. A book about prepping and prognostication, then, which had already foretold its own future.” 
         -Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Like an indefatigable archaeologist of the present, Bradley Garrett explores the dark spaces of our collective imagination, illuminating our spaces of survival, and the people who dream of inhabiting them, with a mordantly humorous—sometimes sympathetic—eye, and ample doses of philosophical insight. From Tennessee to Tasmania, it’s a wild ride.”
          -Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic and Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America

“A beguiling exploration of the architecture of catastrophe. Garrett is a fine companion for this exploration through apocalyptic anxieties, from survivalists in the southwestern U.S. obsessively preparing their hardened retreats to Silicon Valley tech-bros buying their way into immortality. Bunker is compellingly written and endlessly fascinating.”
          -Lewis Dartnell, author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm

“Bradley Garrett’s fine book is about way more than bunkers and boltholes. It’s a look inside some of the world’s weirdest subcultures and a gracefully-written, profound meditation on the sacred strangeness of the human project.”
          -James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and the World Made by Hand novels

This study of bunker sites and the people preparing for the worst couldn’t be better timed.”
         –The Observer 

“A highly addictive book … What makes Garrett’s book fascinating is his portrayal of the balance between fringe thinking and the real world.” 
         –Engineering and Technology Magazine 

“A kind of apocalyptic Super Size Me, in which the author force feeds himself a steady diet of paranoia, conspiracy, eschatology and end-times architecture…There’s a thrilling, chilling coda to Bunker when the author goes on an illegal four-day walk into the ultimate apocalyptic heart of darkness at the Chernobyl exclusion zone… The self-destruction of our species haunts this book: we realize that all along Garrett has been more interested in exploring human limits than human spaces.”
         -The Guardian 

“A good book…recommended…One of Bunker’s strengths is the amount of travel, immersion, and analysis…the book spans four continents: North America, Australia, Europe, and Asia, and it reads like a Who’s Who of the prepping universe.”  
          –The Prepared

“The book is about much more than illicit glimpses into occluded spaces. It is a thoughtful study into the nature of paranoia and the people who try to profit from it—and it makes for a page-turning read.”
          -Financial Times

“If dread is your business, business has never been better, with the sustaining structures of modern life seeming ever more fragile and challenged. The dark charisma of the bunker is probably what will attract readers to this book, but the energetic and gregarious Garrett keeps the story focused on people rather than buildings….Fortunately, [he] is a bright and buoyant guide and Bunker rattles briskly along. And he’s scrupulously fair to his subjects, mostly letting them speak for themselves…A necessary read.”
         -Will Wiles (Literary Review)

“A page-turner that takes the reader on a well-researched global tour of underground defensive constructions from prehistory to a huge array of present-day boltholes, many of which Garrett has explored himself. The book is enlivened by Garrett’s conversations and interactions with stockpiling survivalist ‘preppers,’ and the wealthy in their luxuriously-appointed ultra-secure properties. Bunker discusses the objective and subjective reasons for this withdrawal from the world, not least the ‘dread merchants’ who fuel and profit from our fear. Garrett suggests that bunkerization is ‘the logical endpoint of the atomization of social life,’ and once you’ve read Bunker it’s hard to disagree with him.”
          -Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy, authors of Domestic Fortress

“Brilliant…Bunker, self-evidently a work for our times, shimmers with a Ballardian imagery of disaster and melt-down.”
         –The Spectator

“Fascinating, amusing, crazy, chilling, and surreally topical for what the world is going through now. You’ve got to read this book!”
          -Douglas Preston, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Lost City of the Monkey God

“Three years in the research and writing, Bradley Garrett’s intriguing book investigates ‘preppers,’ those building armored retreats in the expectation of societal collapse brought about by war, disaster or—yes—a pandemic. This is a tartly thoughtful work, by turns witty and philosophical, with an undercurrent of anger at the way we are governed and the commodification of existential fear….Garrett writes pacily, bringing to vivid life a gallery of survivalist wingnuts, conmen and evangelists, and smoothly unpacking a new vocabulary of ‘hardened architecture’ and DUMBS (deep underground military shelters).”
         –Evening Standard

“Reading Bunker, I found myself wondering exactly why it was that I’d rather die than live in an end-times world like this.   Have I lost my devotion to the art of the long view?   Or my sense of adventure?   Or my appetite for being reasonably prepared for hellish scenarios?  Am I delusional to still hold that ‘realistic optimists are those who understand the game but are still in it?’  Or to believe that our ornery, cranky, imaginative, surprising species will continue its astounding history of prevailing against all odds?  No matter where you come down on the apocalypse, this book will stimulate your thinking, as it did mine.  Luck of the publishing gods that it is, unfortunately, so timely.”
          -Joel Garreau, author of Radical Evolution and Edge City and Professor of Culture, Values, and Emerging Technologies, Arizona State University

“Bradley Garrett’s Bunker offers a wry travelogue portraying a world we hope never arrives.  Its Hunter S. Thompson-style journey brings us right up to the edge of the Apocalypse. With a penetrating gaze and colorful detail, Garrett tours the Star Wars bar-like world of Doomsday preppers, grifters, and conspiracy theorists who are readying themselves to survive the end of the world. Through it all, you’re left to wonder: What if they’re right?”
          -Garrett M. Graff, contributing editor at Wired and author of the national bestseller Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die

“An engrossing tour of the fortified living spaces where ‘preppers’ plan to isolate and protect themselves from the collapse of civilization….This richly detailed account will have readers wondering about their own disaster plans.”
          -Publishers Weekly

“Intriguing and often entertaining reading on a phenomenon that seems timeless.”
          -Kirkus Reviews

“Garrett, an academic, photographer, and urban explorer, sets out across four continents to examine the efforts of various doomsday preppers. Along the way, he meets “dread merchants,” doomsday capitalists trying to make a profit combining end-time fears with entrepreneurship… Readers interested in current topics, cultural studies, and survivalism will enjoy this insightful look at prepper culture.”
         -Library Journal

 “Will make you question both [the] eagerness and reticence to go underground or bug out.  Either way, if you want an interesting, open-eyed read, grab Bunker and be prepared.”
        -North Platte Telegraph

 “An excellent resource for entrepreneurs desiring to create a resilience plan, put extra slack in their own system, and minimize the negative consequences for their business.”
         -Entrepreneur magazine

“Garrett travels in search of bunkers and—just as importantly—the people building them, commissioning them and inhabiting them….One of the interesting aspects of the book is investigating what it is that people fear. There are conspiracy theories, fear of pandemics or nuclear war, but much of what is driving the current boom is a vague dread, a general fear for the future….I enjoyed this book, both in its commentary and its exploration. It is bold and curious, and I liked Garrett’s openness to people with strong and unusual opinions. Exploring bunkers is a strikingly useful way to interrogate the fears and preoccupations of the 21st century, and the book raises useful questions about adaptation, survival, and the conflicted nature of being prepared.”
       -Jeremy Williams, The Earthbound Report

“Garrett explores the global movement of preparation (‘prepping’) for the end of the world and makes a hugely persuasive case that ‘survivalism’ is slowly becoming more mainstream….What makes Garrett’s book fascinating is his portrayal of the balance between fringe thinking and the real world. On the one hand, we get to know the self-important prepper entrepreneur whose paranoid daydreams seldom get further than the drawing board, while on the other we are given credible accounts of substantial projects designed to sustain post-apocalyptic communities in secure underground environments…Superb stuff.”
        -TheIET.org