In around 2017 or 2018, I finally picked up the copy of Mike Davis’s The Monster at Our Door from the shelves where it had been sitting for a few years and read it. Davis had been right about so much — about the rise of the carceral state and ubiquitous surveillance, about the ecological disasters that would overtake exurban California, about the rise of ruthlessly protected and patrolled “evil paradises” overlooking slums, to name a random handful — that I felt honestly relieved that he was wrong that a disastrous avian flu pandemic would overtake the world’s cities in the 2000s and 2010s. The book was excellent, as always, in the sweep of its account of how factory farming and natural pathogens were combining to create new viruses that could easily be transmitted to humans, but . . . it didn’t happen, did it? At last, I thought, Mike Davis was wrong about something, and put the book back on the shelf. And here we are, in the autumn of 2022, at the end of three years of a disastrous and avoidable pandemic, the result of a new virus that emerged in much the fashion described in The Monster at Our Door. And now we are without Mike Davis.

There will be a lot of people mourning Davis, and in all of this, it’s important to remember as the anecdotes come in thick and fast just how fucking good a writer he was. There has been almost nobody with his gifts in the four decades — 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s — in which he published prolifically. His talent for suddenly zooming in from the panoramic to the minutely particular, in forcing himself to look at the very worst of the “bad new things” without abandoning the search for the seeds of positive, socialist change; the darkness of his humor; the breadth of his reading; the crackling, jargon-free but dense and forceful momentum of his prose — in all of these he was without rival.

But it’s worth stopping to remember these books, and to read them, and read them again. When you do, you’ll find they have a subtlety that belies the easy portrayal of Davis as a one-dimensional prophet of doom. Start, for instance, with his first book — an atypical one, as it’s one of the only books of his that isn’t in some sense a work of geography — Prisoners of the American Dream, published in 1986. The book intervenes in the endless debate about why it is that the United States, despite the onetime strength of its labor movement, never produced a truly mass socialist party of any kind. His answer is essentially one word — racism — but argued through the various moments that it looked like it could have been different, especially the huge strike waves of the ’30s that culminated in the creation of the CIO trade union federation as a fighting alternative to the deeply racist and conservative AFL; but the CIO was defeated in its attempt to organize the South, and the two were merged in the McCarthyite 1950s.