Severance - Ling Ma

Fiction (Dystopian)

Rating: 8.5/10

Have you ever wondered what would happen if The Office and The Stand commingled to create a an entirely distinct fictional narrative?  Well here you go…

The fever that plagues the victims of this novel doesn’t create zombies, not exactly.  As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to eat your brains.  Instead, they enact and re-enact the menial rituals of their former day to day lives.  An endless mechanical loop of banality until they die…with soul sucking boredom as likely a cause as a virulent virus.

Joining a pack of survivors led by a blowhard named Bob, Candance realizes that her survival may be more arduous with others than apart from them. With the telling moving back and forth in time, we see the contrast between her tedious office job and her travels across post-apocalyptic America. The authors shrewd touch with prose manages to lacerate us with satire in her depiction of the millennial malaise. This book also invites readers to see both the humor and the horror of the distraction, indulgence and decadence of consumerism.

There are lessons to be learned from the rendering of this imagined pandemic, so pay proper attention.

Footnote: This novel will sneak up on you with one of the most hauntingly plausible end-of-the-world scenarios I’ve encountered in recent fiction.  One that resonates with enough of the credible to be particularly unsettling.