ABSTRACT
‘Place is going to be under water within thirty years’, detective Rustin Cohle says while driving through the disaster-stricken landscape of southern Louisiana in the mid-1990s. The first season of the HBO crime series True Detective is set on the verge of disaster. In this chapter, I claim that the prophetic tone – an affective attitude that views the present moment under the shadow of a future disaster – plays a central role not only in works of fiction such as True Detective but also in contemporary life, a life threatened by future virus outbreaks and climate catastrophes.
