EARLIER THIS SPRING, just in time for the North American outbreak of SARS, a book called Our Final Hour came out and tried to ruin my life. Like a new designer drug for global-disaster addicts, it recounted – in popular science terms easy enough for the general public to digest and pass on – the various meltdowns, cataclysms, freak accidents, and errors in judgment that could, conceivably, with varying percentages of likelihood, bring about the end of the world as we know it. My girlfriend and housemates strongly advised me to steer clear of this particular book, knowing how much damage I can inflict on my peace of mind without any help, knowing how often I lie in bed at night wondering what it would look like if the sky started falling.

By that same token I should probably be avoiding Margaret Atwood's new apocalyptic novel, Oryx and Crake, instead of taking it on vacation for summer reading. I should never have stayed up that one night and watched The Ring, in which haunting is an epidemic that will eventually wrap itself around the world until everyone has died of a blurry face. But I should also put down Lynda Barry's Cruddy right now before it gets any uglier – and seemingly it always can. And I very, very seriously need to rethink my record collection, which is full of news about how things are likely to end – in murderous rage, pining away, plane crashes, lost hope. What's the point in avoiding narratives about our final hour? The larger problem is, the world as we know it ends all of the time.

The other day I walked into Aquarius and was drawn toward every sad album. It was like I had one of those beachcomber metal detectors, only mine picked up traces of other people's melancholy and despair instead of their pocket change and missing jewelry. I bought a CD by a local guy named Blaise Smith, mostly because on the front the words "Go Back ... You're Doomed!" ballooned from the mouth of a cow on a hillside. I bought Frankie Sparo's Welcome Crummy Mystics. I bought a whole gorgeous miniseries of country/folk rock tragedy and melodrama – Timesbold's self-titled album, Bonny Prince Billy's Master and Everyone, Jason Molina's Electric Magnolia Co. I went home and reviewed my selection of Sebadoh and Sentridoh albums, pausing on The Original Losing Losers and the upcoming Shrimper rerelease Wasted Pieces to wonder whether people like Lou Barlow ever feel like they've said too much. I listened to Superchunk's Here's to Shutting Up. "Everybody's trying to hold onto a dream, even as they watch it rot," Mac sang, and my housemate paused in the doorway to ask, "Are you trying to make yourself feel bad?"

I wasn't, actively, but it's a very hard habit to break. I feel self-conscious about my propensity to listen to the music of sad people – self-involved young men, mostly – but after all, so much greatness has been achieved by people who refuse to inspire you, who would rather tell you about all of the wrong turns they and their companions took as they headed down, as things fell apart and their lives were unmade in the process. These stories may not have the kind of universal, crowd-scene resonance you find in movies where big rocks hurtle toward the planet and humanity squares its collective shoulders. But in a song like Molina's beautiful "Farewell Transmission," which spills out a life and ends like funeral rites performed at the desert's edge, the sound of disaster clutches at your heart.

Some people know just how to make the collapse of private lives sound like the coming of the apocalypse. Others make the end of the world sound like a lovely dream. The most uplifting music I ended up with this week was a song on Smith's album called "Revelations," on which a woman named Rebecca Marculescu sweetly recounts a vision of the end of the world. "I dreamed that the sky was falling down," she sings. "All of the people are in the streets, crying all alone. All of the buildings are crumbling, one by one."

In Cruddy the buildings crumble all day long too, and a young girl's life is a numbing calamity, every page leading farther off track, gutted bodies piling up behind, blood sticking to everything. It's the kind of book that makes you run through every bad, strange, inexplicable thing that happened to you when you were young. Meanwhile, Marculescu calmly sings about end times. "I dreamed that my prayers were answered. We smiled, happy to be home at last. Heaven on earth now had come to pass at the final judgment day. Funny how all of our darkest fears fade away."

She makes it seem pointless to feel bad about anything. But it sounds too pretty to be true, and besides, it's just a dream in a song. What are the chances? Cruddy's just a novel, but it sounds real enough when the narrator tells us "there is such a thing as hate in the world.... The hippies are trying to cure it but I do not think they will be able to." The first time I read that line, I laughed. But it became less funny, as I tried to get to sleep and lay there wondering what stories and worlds would have ended by morning.

For more thoughts about the apocalypse and other weighty issues, see Lynn Rapoport's new column in News and Culture, coming in August.