The most common comparison is Parable of the Sower, but the closer comparison in my opinion is Ling Ma’s Severance. Their setups are similar, a disease of unknown origin and behavior begins to wipe out urban populations, and both work as easy metaphors of the real pandemic, with all the fear and unknowing that we felt reflected back onto us from the protagonists.

The differences are tonal. Severance's Candace found her purpose in documenting the newly found emptiness of New York, and her moniker of "NY Ghost" reflects the ephemeral nature of her journey. Sans any defined methodology, she comes to embody a ghost in light steps and intermittent shots, posting online to an unknown number of survivors. The disconnect is the point.

Grievers' Dune's journey feels like the inverse. She's starts as a ghost, an outsider, and it takes the events unfolding to find her place in the world, to find purpose in chronicling the people afflicted. Her heart opens to the memory of her parents, to her relationship with her grandmother and to the tragedy that is affecting only black folks and only in her city. The pain is so pointed, so defined, and she moves toward it. Doing so heals her and gives her definition.

It is warm to Severance's cool. It's textural, with the clutter and ephemera of her home working as both narrative tone and as Dune's method of seeing the world outside. She doesn't just document. She catalogs and honors, and in doing so builds a kind of shrine to people she can never truly understand.

It's a beautiful meditation on family, loss, and what ideas like "justice" looks like within a changing social structure. It ends a little abruptly, but it only made me want to read the second one sooner.