Though I’m one who usually strays from end-of-the-world type stories (aside from Alas, Babylon, and The Road ) I wanted to read Severance after being given the task of transcribing an interview with Ling Ma, conducted by Dani Hedlund, for Hedlund’s nonprofit Tethered by Letters. It takes place in New York, and the spread of the disease is fueled by the quick exchange of products and people, thanks to globalization. This apocalypse story is steeped in modernity, in trendiness and fashion. The first chapter of Ling Ma’s Severance sets the tone that is maintained throughout the novel, a story about “the End” of society induced by a deadly pandemic called “Shen Fever,” an illness that results in a sort of psychological perma-torture in which the victim’s brain is overtaken by a fungus that causes them to repeat the rote, quotidian tasks they have oft repeated, as if to amplify the torturous qualities of the tasks themselves, of a (post-post) modern world in which such tasks have already, in a sense, overtaken our brains.
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