The Disaster Store

This study guide will help you analyze the short story “The Disaster Store” (2019) by Helen Phillips. You can also find a summary of the text, as well as inspiration for interpreting it and putting it into perspective.

Helen Phillips (b. 1981) is an American writer. She writes short stories and novels and has won several awards, including the Iowa Review Nonfiction Award and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Some of her works include the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015), and the short story collection And Yet They Were Happy (2017). The short story “The Disaster Store” appeared in 2019 in the Guernica magazine.

Excerpt from the study guide:

Then, the narrative mentions dead Christmas trees and plastic bags stuck on top of trees – signs of negligence and lack of interest in preserving the environment. In the narrator’s story about the opossum, the readers find out that people rarely get to see “an actual animal”, which is a hint that climate change has affected them, too. Also, the disaster store offers traps for “small edible animals” (like racoons and squirrels), which hint that natural resources are getting scarce.

Another particularity of the dystopian setting is the existence of disaster stores. When the narrator is looking for her daughter, she describes the “immense aisles stocked with tarps, tents, collapsible rafts, water purification systems, freeze-dried food, hand-crank radios, bullets, and guns, lumber”...