Severance by Ling Ma

November 26, 2019

Severance by Ling Ma

Candace Chen is an office worker at a publishing company in Manhattan when Shen Fever hits, an epidemic that turns people into non-violent zombies doomed to repeat the same mindless tasks over and over.  As the number of people dwindle, she begins recording photographs of Manhattan in a blog she calls NY Ghost.  When she finally is forced to leave Manhattan, she joins a group of eight other survivors, led by an ex-IT guy named Bob who claims to know of the perfect place for them to regroup and start civilization over.  The place turns out to be an abandoned shopping mall outside Chicago they refer to as The Facility (aka Deer Oaks Mall, probably based on Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg).  When her fellow survivors learn that Candace is pregnant, they elect to hold her prisoner until her baby is born.  Candace fears what their actions mean for her unborn baby and is determined to escape.

Based on the description I wrote above, this should have been a more exciting story than it turned out to be.  There are parallels between the infected zombies’ repetitive actions and Candace’s repetitive tasks at work, her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s, and the factory workers’ jobs in China.  There is lots of filler about Candace’s life when she first came to New York, also about her jerk boyfriends and co-workers.  While it reminded me at times of Station Eleven, it’s basically the millennials’ search for meaning other than mindless consumerism.  Unfortunately Candace, her friends, and the other survivors are all pretty boring.  Maybe I would have connected more with the characters if I was a millennial.  I listened to the audio version and I found myself skipping ahead through some of the boring parts.