“A kind of apocalyptic Super Size Me” (The Guardian) that is both “page turning and thoughtful” (Financial Times) about “prepper” communities around the world that are building fortresses against an array of threats.

Currently, 3.7 million Americans call themselves preppers. Millions more prep without knowing it. Bradley Garrett, who began writing this book years before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, argues that prepping is a rational response to global, social, and political systems that are failing to produce credible narratives of continued stability. Left with a sense of foreboding fueled by disease outbreaks, increasing government dysfunctionality, eroding critical infrastructure, nuclear brinksmanship, and an accelerating climate crisis, people all over the world are responding predictably—by hunkering down.

Garrett traveled across four continents to meet those who are constructing panic rooms, building underground backyard survival chambers, stockpiling supplies, preparing go bags, hiding inflatable rafts, rigging mobile “bugout” vehicles, and burrowing deep into the earth. He has returned with “a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege, and apocalypse” (Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland) from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings our times into new and sharper focus.

With scenes that are “fascinating, amusing, crazy, chilling, and surreally topical” (Douglas Preston, author of Lost City of the Monkey God), Garrett shows that the bunker is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he reveals, it’s in our minds.

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, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores 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 a brilliant, original and never less than 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, Garrett shows, is all around us, in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.

“A page-turner…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