Reviews and Comments

As the title says, this is more of a review of the whole series instead of just the last book.

I enjoyed the first book, but the further it went on, the more it seemed to devolve (pun intended) into a video game. Cartoonish villians commiting evil because of pride, protagonists solving everything through action, super-heteronormative relationships, antiquated gender roles. The list goes on.

There's a lot of redeeming qualities, but the character drama seemed extremely forced, like every situation existed only to exploit or create social dynamics.

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.

I enjoyed the first half more than the latter. It was very much scratching that “locals obfuscating possible malice through ignorance” itch that is common in noir and mystery (think Twin Peaks, The Wicker Man, U-Turn, etc.).

It quickly trades it for undisguised terror mixed with a lot of elements that remind me of Lost (time shenanigans, a literal monster in the woods, etc.). Unlike Lost, almost every mystery is answered at the end, but then we’re left with the unfortunate strain of dystopia fiction where the dangers of the world justify fascism and man-made terror, all the while preserving Americana. No thanks.

I’m interested in the sequels because the world was built up fantastically, but it’ll be interesting which themes from the first will remain with so much already revealed.