Survivor Song

Between this and Bird Box by Josh Malerman, I feel like there's a sub-subgenre of "Remind me to never, ever, ever get pregnant during the apocalypse"-horror.

Something just works for me with books that narratively take place over the course of a single day. Maybe because the single most eventful day of my own life that I can think of was maybe a tenth as packed as what's going on here and certainly way less stressful. The narration juggles between our two protagonists, Natalie (8.5 months pregnant) and Ramola (her former college roommate, current pediatrician), during an outbreak of an extremely fast variant of rabies. People are going feral and biting each other within an hour or two of getting infected, and after an altercation with a stranger, Natalie's husband is killed and she's bitten herself. Immediately we're in a time crunch.

What should be a "simple" trip to the local hospital to rush an emergency C-section turns into a day-long saga. Ramola is a true friend because there are multiple points and challenges that come up in this plot that would have me saying, "this is too fucking much," and bailing on Natalie, but she stuck it out. There are additional characters that ebb and flow within the background as needed, but the central friendship between these two woman - and how far it can be stretched - is the glue that holds it all together.

Not spoiling anything, but the climax at the end had me grimacing so bad and I don't wish that on anyone, but I can't deny that it wasn't a memorable scene or something I didn't see coming from the tone of everything that came before it. Which means I loved it, obviously. But yeah, if you're even thinking about getting pregnant anytime soon, maybe skip this one.

A virus sweeps America. Quarantines are in place. Hospitals are overrun, and the staff are concerned about insufficient Personal Protective Equipment. Vaccines are starting to be distributed, but far right elements of the population hinder efforts, fearing the “deep state” and/or foreign nations.

This is the setting of Survivor Song, a world that’s… pretty close to our current one. Instead of a novel coronavirus, the virus in the novel is a “super rabies” capable of spreading from animals to humans, turning them into berserk and belligerent infection vectors akin to the rage zombies from the movie 28 Days Later.

While this book was written before the COVID-19 outbreak, it turned out to be rather prescient. In interviews, Tremblay has acknowledged that, if anything, he underplayed how the pandemic would be exacerbated by the more ignorant right-wing portion of the population. Reading this book more than 18 months into the pandemic, I tend to agree.

Survivor Song focuses on Natalie, a heavily pregnant woman. When her husband is killed by a rabid intruder and she’s bitten on the arm during the struggle, she meets up with her pediatrician friend Ramola and the two of them embark on a dangerous quest for medical treatment.

This book was a fast-paced, gripping read. It was tense throughout. I also enjoyed the small scale of the story. It didn’t deal with the pandemic as a whole, it focused on this one pregnant woman and her friend. “Immediacy” is the one word that most sums up this novel for me.

However, despite the high personal stakes of the premise, the emotional dimension of the story mostly fell flat for me. Throughout the book, Natalie records voice messages for a baby she becomes increasingly convinced she won’t survive to raise. While normally this would be tear-jerking stuff, even as a parent I wasn’t affected in the way the author intended. This side of the story felt too obvious and familiar, perhaps. Instead, the conclusion of the plot thread involving Josh and Luis, two teenage boys that apparently appeared in a Tremblay book I have not yet read, left me more moved than anything involving the main characters. Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts did a better job of reaching me emotionally, I think.

While my heart strings were left more or less un-tugged, this book was a propulsive and exciting read. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone struggling during the coronavirus pandemic, however, as under the current circumstances this book lacks much in the way of escapism.