James Howard Kunstler is very much a man of his time — a crankish autodidact with a deep and abiding distaste for all things newfangled, who also happens to be a blogger, and a very entertaining one at that. If you’ve ever felt plagued by the profound stupidity of others, you’ll find a kindred spirit in Mr. Kunstler, who is one of the most gifted “haters” you’ll ever have the good fortune to read. Mr. Kunstler’s ur-subject is what he considers the essential despicableness of a civilization built on the promise of abundant cheap energy, and the soullessness and vulgarity of the chintzy pseudo-affluence that comes with it. You get the sense Mr. Kunstler would feel this way regardless of the long-term viability of an oil-driven economy, but conveniently enough he at some point fell under the sway of a cultish fringe of the Peak Oil movement, a group that claims the world’s oil is running out fast and that, as a result, the modern world is going to come crashing down around our heads.

Leaving aside the half-baked geopolitco-cranko-economic analysis that “informs” Mr. Kunstler’s vision of a Peak Oil Ragnarok, it’s hard not to occasionally feel something like that same distaste for our dense, messy way of life. Say it happens when you’re stuck in traffic, surrounded by honking imbeciles, or when you see a sea of unsightly bodies at a too-crowded beach littered in cigarette butts and candy wrappers. But eventually you appeal to your better self and take a deep breath, and think: It could be worse. The moment passes. But not if you are James Howard Kunstler: In that case, you take what are essentially aesthetic judgments — ungenerous ones at that — and allow them to collect and fester into a unified theory explaining why a near-apocalyptic thinning of the human herd might be just what the doctor ordered!

Which leads me to Mr. Kunstler’s superb new novel, “World Made by Hand” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 336 pages, $24). Mr. Kunstler may be a self-righteous, bileful economic ignoramus, but he’s nevertheless managed to write an extraordinary, suspenseful, deeply affecting yarn that very successfully weaves together elements of science fiction, the Western, and even magical realism. Any lover of genre fiction will find much to like, despite the fact that the novel is ultimately veiled propaganda for the cause of abandoning and perhaps incinerating America’s postwar suburbs.

The world in question is our own, in a near future where — you guessed it! — the oil runs out. Now, Mr. Kunstler the pulp novelist could have had a pair of gorgeous Brazilian supermodels rescue America by bringing sexy back to the importation of sugarcane-based ethanol but, being Mr. Kunstler the wild-eyed polemicist, he instead posits rather less plausibly that an infelicitous combination of catastrophes — Peak Oil, a war in the Holy Land, a couple of global pandemics, a couple of catastrophic terrorist attacks, and runaway climate change — finally does America in.

The protagonist, Robert Earle, lives in the small town of Union Grove, N.Y., north of Albany. Robert was once a Boston-based software executive who crisscrossed the country dozens of times a year, but in this new environment he and his neighbors now barely know what’s happening in the next town, let alone what’s happening anywhere else in America or the wider world. This extreme isolation, and the great danger and difficulty involved in traveling even the most meager distances, have made for a very tight-knit community. Those who know Mr. Kunstler the crank can’t help but think there’s an element of wish-fulfillment here: The befuddled masses in their ticky-tacky houses are dead and gone, and good riddance. Yet Mr. Kunstler the novelist manages to convey the profound tragedy here, where almost every parent seems to have lost a child, one way or another.

For all the dread that hangs over this world, the people left are, as you’d expect, the most stoical ones. To pampered urban eyes there is something remarkable in how the people of Union Grove manage to get by without electricity: Days are filled with backbreaking labor, but they end with a sense of satisfaction and restful sleep most of us can barely imagine.

But of course that’s the way humans have lived for most of our history, and old patterns reassert themselves in other ways as well. Women, for example, accept a subordinate position in Union Grove’s civic life, as though feminist insights have no place in this rough-and-tumble world, and romantic relations have a similarly antique cast. Then there is the food. Some of the best, most vivid parts of the book describe how food is preserved and prepared. You can practically taste the corn bread and the fish that choke this world’s now-unpolluted rivers and streams, another upside to that whole end-of-civilization thing.

Inevitably, there are other, less enlightened communities loose in the land, among them the aggressive, white-trash tribesmen of Karptown, a bona fide feudal estate owned by the genteel Bullock clan, and the strange and unpredictable New Faithers, a bizarro remnant of Red America that fought its way north from Virginia to join the oasis of relative serenity that is Union Grove. The story begins in earnest when a young friend of Robert’s dies at the hands of one of Karptown’s hopped-up ex-motorheads, and that is far from the last of the dead bodies. The mysterious Brother Jobe, leader of the New Faithers, offers to lend a helping hand in seeing that justice is done. The trouble is that there is no real law — or rather the only law is the kind you make and enforce yourself. That’s a theme that runs through the book, most excitingly during a wild rescue mission to what’s left of Albany.

“World Made by Hand” is, in the end, a brief for humility, for the simple recognition that all our technological achievements are very fragile ones indeed. Though Mr. Kunstler reaches this conclusion for reasons that are utterly daft, his novel can also be understood as an exercise in imaginative empathy: The parlous, fearful nature of life in this American nightmare is a living, breathing fact for people in lawless, poverty-stricken parts of the globe. So read this book.

Mr. Salam is an editor at the Atlantic and the co-author of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream,” forthcoming from Doubleday.