The source of the word "apocalypse" is the Greek for "revealing the hidden" and not for "destroyed." In his book of essays on The Message In The Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has To Do With The Other, Percy makes a list of new subjects for sociologists to study with catastrophe as a key to human nature:

"Suicide in San Francisco; or The End of the Frontier: Correlations between Point of Origin, Level of Education, Time of Arrival, and Number of Rotations between New York and San Francisco of 150 Suicides Who Jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge,"

or "Sadness in Suburbia: Psychiatric Profiles of Twenty-Five Housewives before and after reading Betty Friedan."

or "Scientific Transcendence and Sexual Imminence, or the Relationship of Lust to the Spirit of Abstraction: The Sexual Behavior of Twelve Scientists at Los Alamos in 1942-45, the Zenith of Transcendence of Twentieth-Century Physics Interrupted by Periodic Re-Entry into the Organismic and Cultural Imminence of Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and New York; Sexual Intercourse as Prototype of Re-entry,"

or "The Aesthetic Reversal of Depression on Commuter Trains: Before-and-After Muscle-Tension Studies on Ten Depressed Commuters Reading a Book about Depressed Commuters on a Train,"

or "How Bad Is Bad News? A Survey of the Selective Predilection of 250 New York City Subway Riders for News Stories Headlined 'War', 'Plane Crash,' 'Assassination,' 'Rape,' 'Murder,' 'Kidnapping,'"

or "Catastrophe as Catalyst in the Ontology of Joy, or Hurricane Parties on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Camille; An In-Depth Study of Eleven Victims Who Elected to Stay Compared with Eleven Random Control Subjects Who Elected to Leave."

BUT PAPERS on these subjects are still known as novels and so Percy has set up his own experiment with one real and one artificial hurricane. The artificial hurricane is the weather created by a machine on 'Lancelot's estate for a movie in which his wife and the movie crew proclaim the "life-enhancing" power of sex between strangers stranded together during a hurricane. While the real hurricane is approaching, Lancelot learns of his wife's infidelities and has his black servant Elgin, an MIT student, secretly videotape her liaison with the director. As the hurricane hits, Lancelot ignites the house, his wife and her cohorts in it. Subsequently he is committed to the Center for Aberrant Behavior.

Lancelot tells another hurricane story as an emblem of his apocalyptic intentions and in counterpoint to the movie and all it represents. A moment of brilliant clarity hit a middle-aged couple in the face of the hurricane: they realized and said out loud how bored they were with their lives and each other, made terrific love during the storm, and "took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce." Lancelot's and Percy's hurricanes are meant to sweep out the artificial hurricane of false elation and superficial radicalism that do not pull out the roots of the problem. Lancelot concludes with a Christian manifesto, but as Percy says in his essay "Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,"

The novelist is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over.

Lancelot's book-length monologue is addressed not only to the reader but also to Percival, a priest-physician and boyhood friend. His name rings of both the author's own and of Lancelot's companion in the Arthurian legend. He is silent, staring at a girl out the window until the book closes with his response to Lancelot that is Percy's hope for a rejuvenated Christianity.

So you plan to take a little church in Alabama, Father, preach the gospel, turn bread into flesh, forgive the sins of Buick dealers, administer communion to suburban housewives?

Yes.

You speak!...So what's the new beginning in that? Isn't that more of the same?

You are silent...One last question--and somehow I think you know the answer... Will [Anna] join me in Virginia and will she and I and Siobhan begin a new life there?