It's the cynicism of how death gives way to flourishing commerce - hotels where clients can stage macabre final moments with their loved ones' corpses for closure, bitcoin whose value rises and falls with death tolls, social media profiles that allow digital ghosts to live past their failed flesh-and-blood bodies. Make no mistake, this is a book about death.īut it's not a singular nor reductive depiction of death. Nagamatsu's collection of interlinked stories unflinchingly inhabits the ripple effects of a 30,000-year-old Arctic plague, released from melting permafrost: an aimless young man works at a euthanasia theme park for terminally ill kids, placing them on the roller coaster that will kill them before the plague does a test subject pig gains sentience, only to realize its true purpose as an organ donor people connect in VR online chat rooms to make suicide pacts. John Mandel's pandemic tale Station Eleven, but at least the latter is mostly about a performance troupe thriving in the hopeful post-apocalypse. The book has drawn comparisons to Emily St. How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut novel about a climate change virus in 2030 that alters humanity centuries into the future, could hit all too hard for those grieving the loss of loved ones to coronavirus, as well as the loss of their former lives pre-pandemic.
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