Apocalypse Author:Nancy Springer After years of taunts and torment about her congenitally disfigured face, a young woman asks the Devil to initiate the end of the world in her home town, the coal mining site of Hoadley, Pa. Transformed into an angelic figure, Joanie Musser returns to watch her revenge played out as the locals try to fathom the apocalypse in signs varying from a... more » satyr in the woods to baby-faced insects crying in the night. This time the four horsemen are a quarter of local women: anorectic Cally Wilmore as Famine, cancer-ridden Gigi Wildasin as Death, AIDS-infected Shirley Danyo as Pestilence and sword-wielding, pseudonymous Elspeth as War. This offbeat fantasy may end somewhat flatly but its mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice make for some lively passages.« less