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Under the headline “Nightmare Prophecy,” this startling notion came not from a politician or an academic but from a review of what may have been that year’s most peculiar novel: Van Tassel Sutphen’s “The Doomsman.”

“But softly now; you are tearing the lace of my sleeve. A plague on your clumsy fingers!” one Doomsman warns Constans, in that time-honored tradition of upbraiding rubes from the suburbs.

Rather, what makes “The Doomsman” fascinating is its vision of an abandoned New York City as “a wilderness of brick and mortar”—a land where the Financial District is ruled by owls, and where the Flatiron Building is prized primarily by archers for its fine sight lines.

Van Tassel Sutphen, who lived from 1861 to 1945, was most at home on the golf course, but as a brother-in-law to the Harper publishing family he found himself toiling in the company’s office on lower Broadway—the very same blocks that he’d gleefully lay waste to in “The Doomsman.”

The charm of “The Doomsman” doesn’t come from its style, which is more Sir Walter Scott than H. G. Wells; Sutphen inexplicably has the New York of 2015 regress to a dialect best described as Mock Tudor.