Steven Church grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose predictable daily rhythms give way easily to anxiety and a place that, ever since Civil War times, has been a canvas for sporadic scenes of havoc and violence in America's popular imagination. His fantasies of nuclear meltdown, genetic mutation and post-apocalyptic survival found a focal point in 1982, when Lawrence, Kansas, became part of a movie set for a film called The Day After. A richly layered and darkly comic memoir.