[ed. And a world-wide pandemic.]
There is a scene early on in George Romero’s horror classic “Dawn of the Dead,” from 1978, in which a great tide of zombies converges on a once sacred American institution: the shopping mall. Romero had more or less invented the modern zombie a decade before, in “Night of the Living Dead,” set mostly at a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. At the mall, the creatures—stiff, as always, with frozen expressions—resemble the mannequins that surround them. When a still-living character asks, bewildered, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” another answers, “Instinct, memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” Romero’s satire, like the violence in his movies, could be blunt. When “Dawn” was remade, in 2004, the Times called the unimaginative update “a cautionary tale for those dying to shop.”
A shopping mall also features prominently in “Severance” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Ling Ma’s zombie apocalypse of a début, which was published in August, won the Kirkus Prize for fiction in October, and has begun to pop up, as the year nears its end, on various best-of-2018 lists. In “Severance,” the mall reads as a knowing gesture: Romero’s work, and the waves of subsequent entrants to the genre that he created, are, one gathers, part of the world that her characters inhabit. When the novel opens, a group is fleeing an epidemic that has decimated the global population; one man says that life has come to feel like a “zombie or vampire flick.” The group’s leader replies, “Let’s think about the zombie narrative. It’s not about a specific villain. One zombie can be easily killed, but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat. This narrative, then, is not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force: the force of the mob, of mob mentality. Perhaps it’s better known these days as the hive mind.”
This blowhard, a former I.T. guy named Bob, “who has played every iteration of Warcraft with near a religious fervor,” is not the hero of the book. No one is, really, but the protagonist is Candace Chen, a quiet, dispassionate twentysomething who, in the years leading up to the apocalypse, lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan, at a publishing company, where she oversees the manufacture of Bibles, mostly in China. (“Of any book,” Candace notes, “the Bible embodies the purest form of product packaging, the same content repackaged a million times over, in new combinations ad infinitum.”) “Severance” is set not in the near-future typical of dystopian fantasies but in a reimagined version of the recent past—specifically, autumn, 2011, around the time of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park. The epidemic that has befallen the globe is called Shen Fever—it is believed to have originated in Shenzhen, China, the world capital of electronics manufacturing—and it is contracted through the inhalation of “microscopic fungal spores.” Before it kills its victims, it sends them into a zombie-like cycle of repetition, endlessly performing familiar tasks unto death. Candace is one of the last survivors in New York: even as the city’s infrastructure starts to collapse, making it nearly impossible to get to the office, she stays, roaming the streets with a camera and uploading pictures to a blog that she created years before, called NY Ghost, in the hope that her images of the dying city will spur others to contribute nostalgic visions of the place they once called home. (...)
Ma’s prose is, for the most part, understated and restrained, somewhat in the manner of Kazuo Ishiguro, and particularly his classic “The Remains of the Day,” from 1989, which Ma has cited as an influence. As in that book—and in Ishiguro’s subsequent novel “Never Let Me Go,” published in 2005, about human clones who lead quiet lives until their organs are harvested—one has the sense that the protagonist’s disaffected personality is symptomatic of a deeply troubled system, the horrors of which she has been unable, or unwilling, to face. “At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile,” Candace says. “Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way.” (...)
Such reveries can be dangerous. Bob, the I.T. guy, leads the group of survivors west, to a mysterious place he calls the Facility, located somewhere near Chicago. On the way, a member of the group sneaks off to her childhood home, in Ohio, and contracts Shen Fever while trying on teen-age outfits still hanging in her old bedroom. Nostalgia, Candace realizes, may play a role in the onset of the fever. “The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in,” Bob says. “You have to keep moving.” This is precisely what the peripatetic Candace has always done, leaving China, Utah, New York. No wonder that she seems to be immune.
In this zombie novel, though, there is nothing particularly heroic about survival. On the way to the Facility, the group must navigate a world ravaged by disease; to stock up on supplies, they ransack homes, favoring those whose inhabitants are already dead. When the occupants are still in the throes of the fever, Bob drills his group to harvest usable supplies with maximum efficiency and, before leaving, to shoot the fevered residents in the head. He sees this as mercy killing, though Candace wonders at his real motivations. Still, she knows how to assimilate—how to survive by adopting new, discomfiting customs. When Bob inquires if she has adequately integrated herself into the group, she marvels at how he “asks the question in all seriousness, as if I had any choice.” It’s taken some adjustment, she answers finally. “I’ve been alone for a long time.” For all her particularity as a character, Candace comes to seem emblematic after all—adrift, without allegiances, embodying the atomization of late-capitalist humans in a society stripped to its bones.
The Facility, we discover when the group finally reaches it, is, inevitably, a mall. The remaining survivors pick abandoned stores—Aldo, Bath & Body Works, Journeys—to convert into personal living spaces. They eat out of vending machines and live in as much fear of each other as of the fever. When the fever does strike, it is not because anyone was dying to shop but because the mall, it turns out, was a part of someone’s past. The desire to return to cozier memories makes people vulnerable to the disease destroying the world.
by Jiayang Fan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Sally Deng
[ed. See also: What People In China Are Saying About The Outbreak On Social Media (NPR).]
There is a scene early on in George Romero’s horror classic “Dawn of the Dead,” from 1978, in which a great tide of zombies converges on a once sacred American institution: the shopping mall. Romero had more or less invented the modern zombie a decade before, in “Night of the Living Dead,” set mostly at a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. At the mall, the creatures—stiff, as always, with frozen expressions—resemble the mannequins that surround them. When a still-living character asks, bewildered, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” another answers, “Instinct, memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” Romero’s satire, like the violence in his movies, could be blunt. When “Dawn” was remade, in 2004, the Times called the unimaginative update “a cautionary tale for those dying to shop.”
A shopping mall also features prominently in “Severance” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Ling Ma’s zombie apocalypse of a début, which was published in August, won the Kirkus Prize for fiction in October, and has begun to pop up, as the year nears its end, on various best-of-2018 lists. In “Severance,” the mall reads as a knowing gesture: Romero’s work, and the waves of subsequent entrants to the genre that he created, are, one gathers, part of the world that her characters inhabit. When the novel opens, a group is fleeing an epidemic that has decimated the global population; one man says that life has come to feel like a “zombie or vampire flick.” The group’s leader replies, “Let’s think about the zombie narrative. It’s not about a specific villain. One zombie can be easily killed, but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat. This narrative, then, is not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force: the force of the mob, of mob mentality. Perhaps it’s better known these days as the hive mind.”
This blowhard, a former I.T. guy named Bob, “who has played every iteration of Warcraft with near a religious fervor,” is not the hero of the book. No one is, really, but the protagonist is Candace Chen, a quiet, dispassionate twentysomething who, in the years leading up to the apocalypse, lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan, at a publishing company, where she oversees the manufacture of Bibles, mostly in China. (“Of any book,” Candace notes, “the Bible embodies the purest form of product packaging, the same content repackaged a million times over, in new combinations ad infinitum.”) “Severance” is set not in the near-future typical of dystopian fantasies but in a reimagined version of the recent past—specifically, autumn, 2011, around the time of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park. The epidemic that has befallen the globe is called Shen Fever—it is believed to have originated in Shenzhen, China, the world capital of electronics manufacturing—and it is contracted through the inhalation of “microscopic fungal spores.” Before it kills its victims, it sends them into a zombie-like cycle of repetition, endlessly performing familiar tasks unto death. Candace is one of the last survivors in New York: even as the city’s infrastructure starts to collapse, making it nearly impossible to get to the office, she stays, roaming the streets with a camera and uploading pictures to a blog that she created years before, called NY Ghost, in the hope that her images of the dying city will spur others to contribute nostalgic visions of the place they once called home. (...)Ma’s prose is, for the most part, understated and restrained, somewhat in the manner of Kazuo Ishiguro, and particularly his classic “The Remains of the Day,” from 1989, which Ma has cited as an influence. As in that book—and in Ishiguro’s subsequent novel “Never Let Me Go,” published in 2005, about human clones who lead quiet lives until their organs are harvested—one has the sense that the protagonist’s disaffected personality is symptomatic of a deeply troubled system, the horrors of which she has been unable, or unwilling, to face. “At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile,” Candace says. “Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way.” (...)
Such reveries can be dangerous. Bob, the I.T. guy, leads the group of survivors west, to a mysterious place he calls the Facility, located somewhere near Chicago. On the way, a member of the group sneaks off to her childhood home, in Ohio, and contracts Shen Fever while trying on teen-age outfits still hanging in her old bedroom. Nostalgia, Candace realizes, may play a role in the onset of the fever. “The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in,” Bob says. “You have to keep moving.” This is precisely what the peripatetic Candace has always done, leaving China, Utah, New York. No wonder that she seems to be immune.
In this zombie novel, though, there is nothing particularly heroic about survival. On the way to the Facility, the group must navigate a world ravaged by disease; to stock up on supplies, they ransack homes, favoring those whose inhabitants are already dead. When the occupants are still in the throes of the fever, Bob drills his group to harvest usable supplies with maximum efficiency and, before leaving, to shoot the fevered residents in the head. He sees this as mercy killing, though Candace wonders at his real motivations. Still, she knows how to assimilate—how to survive by adopting new, discomfiting customs. When Bob inquires if she has adequately integrated herself into the group, she marvels at how he “asks the question in all seriousness, as if I had any choice.” It’s taken some adjustment, she answers finally. “I’ve been alone for a long time.” For all her particularity as a character, Candace comes to seem emblematic after all—adrift, without allegiances, embodying the atomization of late-capitalist humans in a society stripped to its bones.
The Facility, we discover when the group finally reaches it, is, inevitably, a mall. The remaining survivors pick abandoned stores—Aldo, Bath & Body Works, Journeys—to convert into personal living spaces. They eat out of vending machines and live in as much fear of each other as of the fever. When the fever does strike, it is not because anyone was dying to shop but because the mall, it turns out, was a part of someone’s past. The desire to return to cozier memories makes people vulnerable to the disease destroying the world.
by Jiayang Fan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Sally Deng
[ed. See also: What People In China Are Saying About The Outbreak On Social Media (NPR).]
