In any other year Tremblay's riff on the zombie apocalypse would be a safely speculative piece of genre fictionĪs in reality, the situation is mired in misinformation. In 2020, however, the novel seems disturbingly prophetic, with references to “lockdown”, the lack of PPE and the efficacy of vaccination. In any other year Survivor Song would be a safely speculative piece of genre fiction: it is Tremblay’s riff on the zombie apocalypse, told with formal playfulness and meta-awareness. From here we follow Natalie and her paediatrician, Ramola, in their search for medical help. In the chaos of the early outbreak we are introduced to the heavily pregnant Natalie, moments before her husband is killed and she herself is bitten. Symptoms appear within hours of infection, making the infected homicidal and shattering the social infrastructure. In Massachusetts a new strain of rabies has made the jump to human transmission.
If the master of horror is feeling troubled, spare a thought for authors introducing new fictional crises into this uneasy summer.ĭepending on your appetite for plague fiction, the timing of Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song is either excellent or appalling. In the early weeks of the outbreak Contagion leapt to the top of the most-streamed movie lists, Reddit and Twitter were aflame with claims that a Dean Koontz novel had “predicted” Covid-19, and comparisons to Stephen King’s 1978 disasterpiece, The Stand, were so frequent that the author himself felt the need to apologise for 2020. T he horror genre offers a frame of reference for global pandemic, however unsettling.
0 kommentar(er)
