Book Review: Severance

(Bought at Barnes and Noble full price): Ling Ma must be psychic or something. Her novel Severance was published in 2018, two years before the COVID pandemic and three years before the Apple TV series (unrelated) of the same name aired. Yet, she accurately predicted a worldwide wave of disease would originate in China and the spread and disrupt life as we know it. The consequences of Ma's fictional plague are much worse than the actual COVID disaster. As in many previous post-apocalyptic novels, only a few survive and band together. But what differentiates Severance from most other end-of-the-world works is it compares the pre and post catastrophe worlds. The main character is Candace Chen, a Chinese-American office worker drifting through her life. Chapters on her world before and after the pandemic alternate. But in both she has to deal with office-like hierarchies. In her job as a publishing production manager in charge of bibles, she comes up against patriarchal bosses and soul-crushing routines. In the after times, she submits to an oppressive male leader who guides their group of survivors through a dangerous nightmarescape full of zombie-like victims of the fever. Well, they're not brain-eaters like in the Walking Dead.

Anyway, Ma masterfully depicts Candace's two realities and her struggles to realize her full potential. The scenes describing New York as the fever takes over were strikingly real, reminding me of what Gotham was like during COVID--an empty Times Square, shuttered Broadway theaters, deserted office buildings. There are also insights into the immigrant experience and searching for your vocation. Candace emerges as a confused heroine always unsure of her next step, until she is forced to make a choice. As in The Secret History which I finished just before this one, I could not put the book down because I had to find out what happens next.