In The Gone World, the existential threat of human extinction becomes a justification for interpersonal and systematic cruelty rather than inspiring unity or heroism. Sweterlitsch argues that faced with the incomprehensible apocalypse of the Terminus, humans abandon all moral restraint, embracing terrorism, torture, and mass murder, rationalizing that their atrocities are necessary to save humanity. This grim portrayal suggests that the fight against a cosmic doom can unleash humanity basest instincts, demonstrating that the desperation to survive can be just as monstrous as the threat of annihilation itself.

The novel posits that the foundation of human cruelty is the rejection of self-sacrifice in favor of violent self-preservation, as evidenced during the mutiny aboard the USS Libra. When Commander Remarque discovers that her ship’s journey may have unleashed the Terminus, she proposes mass suicide as a noble act to erase the discovery and protect humanity. Hyldekrugger and his followers refuse. Rather than sacrificing themselves for the greater good, they choose survival at any cost. In her description of Remarque’s murder Nicole emphasizes the cruelty as well as violence of the mutiny: “They killed the crew loyal to Remarque […] They captured her. They cut Remarque’s throat in front of everyone—they were cheering at her death. They killed her. Hyldekrugger killed her. They passed the body around, everyone involved in the mutiny despoiling her” (158). This foundational act of violence establishes the core philosophy of their network: Hyldekrugger’s group believes that their own continued existence is paramount, and any brutality is justified to ensure it, underscoring a broader tension between a predetermined extinction and the will to survive it.

The murder of the Mursult family provides an extreme example of Hyldekrugger’s descent into inhumanity. To prevent Patrick Mursult from revealing their secrets, Hyldekrugger and Cobb slaughter Mursult’s wife and two young children with an ax, and kidnap his oldest daughter, Marian. The horror is compounded by the ritualistic removal of the victims’ fingernails and toenails, which Moss perceives as an act of cruelty that compounds the violence of the murders: “Moss noticed that the boy’s fingernails had been removed […] his toenails, too […] She checked the woman and found that her nails had been removed as well. Someone—a man, no doubt—had killed these people, then knelt in the gore to pluck their nails from them” (16). For Moss, the detail shifts the murders from pragmatic, albeit ruthless, killings into a cruel disregard for their lives and bodies, demonstrating how their fear of extinction has stripped them of all empathy. Hyldekrugger’s victims are no longer innocent people but mere components in a causal “chain” that must be broken, their lives rendered meaningless in the face of a larger, apocalyptic logic.

The group’s capacity for atrocity becomes systematic and chillingly scientific with the discovery of the chemical weapons lab in Buckhannon. Here, they use a Ryder truck as a mobile gas chamber to test lethal agents like sarin and Ebola on kidnapped victims, including the teenage Marian Mursult. Moss views the horrors enacted on the bodies of their victims as evidence of a complete moral collapse, turning their mission from a desperate fight into a cold, experimental pursuit of violence. Within the novel, Sweterlitsch links the atrocities committed by Hyldekrugger’s group with other global acts of terrorism and violence, connecting the terror cell’s actions to a wider history of humanity radicalizing and turning on its own. Brock tells Moss that the experiments carried out in the chemical weapons lab are “Copycatting the Japanese subway cult from a couple years back […] have people coming in who worked with Tokyo during that investigation” (202). By torturing and murdering innocents to find more efficient ways to kill, Hyldekrugger’s group demonstrates that in their attempt to prevent the end of humanity, they have sacrificed their own.