The Fix has a great, very detailed review up of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:

There’s a wry, fatalistic charm to Dale Bailey’s “The End of the World as We Know It,” an unusual and highly self-conscious tale of the apocalypse. It begins with a brief description of the Bubonic plague, and interspersed throughout the subsequent narrative are a number of digressions reflecting on the conventions of the “end-of’the-world” story to which, as Bailey observes, his protagonist fails to conform. Alongside these dissections of the mechanics of the sub-genre, Bailey also cites a number of real life apocalypses—Pompeii, Krakatoa, 9/11, the extinction event that did in the dinosaurs, the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda. One event he mentions—the death of Elvis Presley—hints at the real point of the story, which is that for both victims and survivors, the apocalypse is largely a personal event. [whole review]
 

It’s really a well-crafted review, and considering it’s written by several different reviewers, the overall result is remarkably cohesive.