Paul Tremblay's books mostly get mixed reviews, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this. I decided to pick it up as the first book I read after moving to Massachusetts, which didn't disappoint as the setting of the book was an area I had just driven through earlier that day.
I liked Survivor Song. I won't say it was one of the best books I've ever read, but it was enjoyable enough. Super rabies as a stand in for zombies worked quite well, and it wrapped up nicely, which I know is a bone of contention for some readers with other works of his. Given that this book came out in 2019, it was very interesting to see how spot on Paul was about certain groups and their ridiculous conspiracy theories.
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 …
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.
