I'm not generally a fan of zombie novels, by and large (my favorite genre is the plague novel, in which there's usually less dehumanization of the "infected"), but both Severance and Malcolm Devlin's And Then I Woke Up have really stuck with me since I read them both about a year ago.
If I may, you might really, really like Stephen Graham Jones' brand new novel Buffalo Hunter Hunter, which I'll have a post on next month. It's a vampire novel, so not really either a plague or a zombie one, but the nature of dehumanization, and the question of whether a monster can retain his humanity are absolutely central to the work. It's *fascinating*.
What we witnessed in Washington was not the disease but the symptom. The disease is a civilization built on moral bankruptcy, a society that forces us to watch a livestreamed genocide while demanding applause for the killers. The disease is a system that makes empathy a crime, protest illegal, and justice unreachable.
This cognitive dissonance – this profound moral schizophrenia – has been imposed on an American population already fractured by economic precarity, mental illness, and social atomization. Americans are barely clinging to sanity in a society that increasingly resembles a vast psychological experiment testing how much gaslighting, emotional abuse, and dysfunction human beings can endure before imploding or exploding.
I haven't read this book, but it sounds like a really interesting companion to Ling Ma's Severance, in which the zombies are similarly stuck in the past, but aren't violent; in that apocalypse, it's succumbing to nostalgia itself that zombifies you. And it's bleak, but a little bit less bleak than this one seems to be.
Thank you so much for this comparison! You are the second person who's mentioned Severance to me in the last week or so, which is a strong sign that it's time for me to familiarize myself with it. I'm grateful for the precis you included! I'm super interested in the idea that nostalgia itself is dangers/dehumanizing. And yes, Whitehead's novel is bleak in the extreme. And also weirdly very funny.
I'm not generally a fan of zombie novels, by and large (my favorite genre is the plague novel, in which there's usually less dehumanization of the "infected"), but both Severance and Malcolm Devlin's And Then I Woke Up have really stuck with me since I read them both about a year ago.
If I may, you might really, really like Stephen Graham Jones' brand new novel Buffalo Hunter Hunter, which I'll have a post on next month. It's a vampire novel, so not really either a plague or a zombie one, but the nature of dehumanization, and the question of whether a monster can retain his humanity are absolutely central to the work. It's *fascinating*.
I liked his novel The Only Good Indians. I'll check it out!
My capsule review of Severance and a bunch of other plague novels, if you're interested: https://www.tumblr.com/solointhesand/782394336756318208/plague-fiction-roundup?source=share
The REAL meets the UNREAL:
What we witnessed in Washington was not the disease but the symptom. The disease is a civilization built on moral bankruptcy, a society that forces us to watch a livestreamed genocide while demanding applause for the killers. The disease is a system that makes empathy a crime, protest illegal, and justice unreachable.
This cognitive dissonance – this profound moral schizophrenia – has been imposed on an American population already fractured by economic precarity, mental illness, and social atomization. Americans are barely clinging to sanity in a society that increasingly resembles a vast psychological experiment testing how much gaslighting, emotional abuse, and dysfunction human beings can endure before imploding or exploding.
https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/empires-self-fulfilling-prophecy
I haven't read this book, but it sounds like a really interesting companion to Ling Ma's Severance, in which the zombies are similarly stuck in the past, but aren't violent; in that apocalypse, it's succumbing to nostalgia itself that zombifies you. And it's bleak, but a little bit less bleak than this one seems to be.
Thank you so much for this comparison! You are the second person who's mentioned Severance to me in the last week or so, which is a strong sign that it's time for me to familiarize myself with it. I'm grateful for the precis you included! I'm super interested in the idea that nostalgia itself is dangers/dehumanizing. And yes, Whitehead's novel is bleak in the extreme. And also weirdly very funny.