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I like to imagine that people drawn to unsettling and uncanny stories have a shared connection to a certain era of subversive media. Today, you only have to pick up your phone to find a trove of this content (what does subversive even mean anymore?), but elder millennials remember when you really had to hunt for it. There exists a generation of us who were molded by Sundance and IFC features, MTV’s Liquid Television, and the like. I sometimes encounter books that throw me back to this time in my own life and feed the beast that hungers for the kind of horror-adjacent indie content I used to love. It happens that this book hits all the right spots for subversive elder millennials like me.
Severance by Ling Ma
A send-up and takedown of corporate drudgery, late-stage capitalism, and adulthood listlessness familiar to so many of us, Ling Ma’s Severance serves up a wry and tense satire featuring an eerily monotonous pandemic.
Candace Chen, a millennial publishing drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is so devoted to routine she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps across New York. But then it spreads beyond the city. Families flee. Companies hit pause. Subways squeak to a halt. In a heartbeat, Candace is uninfected but alone, wandering the streets to photograph the silent, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.
Even antisocial Candace can’t be content, much less survive, on her own forever. Enter a group of survivors led by power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers or cling to the only community she has left?
The zombie novel has a storied history as a fable for societal ills and mindlessness. While the zombies in this novel aren’t sprinting after prey, moaning, “Braiiiiins,” they’re frightening for differently unsettling reasons. Threaded through this tale of survivalism, Candace’s observations about her dazed approach to life, her unmoored isolation, and her parents’ assimilation after immigrating take this zombie story into the sort of irreverent and richly untidy cerebral spaces the subversive craves.
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What’s your favorite zombie novel? Let’s chat in the comments!