Malcolm Devlin

A pandemic story, but with a twist. To begin with at least, the disease seems to be turning people into monsters: its victims look, and smell, like something out of a horror movie—walking corpses, cannibalistic. Banding together in desperation, the uninfected have been arming themselves and fighting back … except that this disease affects the mind and alters the way you see the world; in particular, it changes the way you see other people. So who exactly are “the infected” here?
    There are flashbacks to contend with, changing POVs, and also, perhaps, a less than reliable narrator. These events are being described by Spence (Lewis Spencer) to a group of fellow inmates in the day-room of an institution which could be a hospital, or something more sinister, but on the surface appears to be a rehabilitation centre for people who have been successfully treated. Spence has been through the whole nightmare himself—infection, madness, recovery—and now (so he says) is telling his story.
    This is a short review for a short read (164 pages), but it’s impossible to say much more without committing spoilers. The subject here though is truth and lies, including lies you tell yourself, and I think there’s a lot more to Spence’s story and the book’s “disease”.… (meer)

An interesting twist on the zombie apocalypse trope, and certainly a commentary on current politics, this short novel postulates a world where people's perceptions form a narrative that becomes their "truth" even in defiance of objective reality--in this case, that the dead are coming back to life and will eat them. What would happen if a signficant portion of the populace started behaving as if it were [The Walking Dead] in real life and believing the other people trying to go about their business were actually brain-munching zombies? I was with it for a while, but instead of exploring its premise and the nature of reality as deeply as I hoped it would, and perhaps commenting more insightfully on the current climate of deep fakes and no more facts, I think it fizzled out as it went on.… (meer)

I’m categorizing this as horror mostly because that’s what the author says it is. For my part, it’s…what genre is Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”? If that’s horror, then so is this, but neither are the first sort of stories that leap to mind when thinking of the genre, in my opinion.

I did enjoy this, but I wonder if I’d have enjoyed it less had I not been listening to the audiobook. There were long sections in the latter part of the book where I think I might have been tempted to skim ahead to get back to action. The majority of the book is *not* action; it’s thoughtful deliberation, twisted recollections, and dialogue stilted by design. The draw of the book is in just that: those active parts being told and retold until nobody is certain what was real or not.

I like the concept. Definitely more unnerving than scary, though.… (meer)