The most interesting thing about Paul Treblay's pandemic horror novel Survivors Song is how closely it tracks with the real world horrors of the COVID virus, and the most amazing thing about the novel is that it was penned before the pandemic existed.
In an early passage, one of the novel's two main characters, a Massachusetts doctor, describes the situation in an online communication with her coworkers in this manner:
We need to tell everyone that we have no clue how to handle this. That friggin news conference in Boston was all lies! Homeland security guy said area hospitals all have appropriate staff and equipment. Jackass president tweeting the same.
Sound familiar? There are references to a catastrophic lack of PPE, an overflowing of hospital wards, the setting up of emergency triage tents, the frightening loss of doctors and nurses to the virus along with those thousands who come in sick, and of course the now familiar government ineptitude, and worse yet recalcitrance, in effectively addressing the pandemic.
Isn't it odd how fiction writers so often outline the shape of things to come well before we actually find ourselves living them?
Outside of the hospital environment, an atmosphere of lockdown is described, streets nearly deserted, businesses closed, only the grocery stores open, and their stocks stressed by hoarding buyers.
After shared, restrained laughter, they drive in silence, passing through this new ghost town, where the ghosts are reflections of what was and projections of what might never be again.
Of course, Survivors Song is not about a respiratory virus pandemic, which though horrifying in itself is not nearly as terrifying as the rabies pandemic imagined in the novel, which is very easily transmitted through both animal and human bite as well as mere contact with saliva. In this sense, Survivors Song becomes a rather common, though well written, well constructed zombie novel (although the doctor already mentioned continually chides others not to call these poor infected people 'zombies'--for after all they are not dead or undead but merely ill).
Having read Treblay's excellent A Head Full of Ghosts, I found Survivors Song, aside from its prescient qualities, weak in comparison and lacking in narrative depth. Nonetheless, it provides an entertaining journey through a panic stricken pandemic land and offers a whole host of Whoa, deja vu moments.
In an early passage, one of the novel's two main characters, a Massachusetts doctor, describes the situation in an online communication with her coworkers in this manner:
We need to tell everyone that we have no clue how to handle this. That friggin news conference in Boston was all lies! Homeland security guy said area hospitals all have appropriate staff and equipment. Jackass president tweeting the same.
Sound familiar? There are references to a catastrophic lack of PPE, an overflowing of hospital wards, the setting up of emergency triage tents, the frightening loss of doctors and nurses to the virus along with those thousands who come in sick, and of course the now familiar government ineptitude, and worse yet recalcitrance, in effectively addressing the pandemic.
Isn't it odd how fiction writers so often outline the shape of things to come well before we actually find ourselves living them?
Outside of the hospital environment, an atmosphere of lockdown is described, streets nearly deserted, businesses closed, only the grocery stores open, and their stocks stressed by hoarding buyers.
After shared, restrained laughter, they drive in silence, passing through this new ghost town, where the ghosts are reflections of what was and projections of what might never be again.
Of course, Survivors Song is not about a respiratory virus pandemic, which though horrifying in itself is not nearly as terrifying as the rabies pandemic imagined in the novel, which is very easily transmitted through both animal and human bite as well as mere contact with saliva. In this sense, Survivors Song becomes a rather common, though well written, well constructed zombie novel (although the doctor already mentioned continually chides others not to call these poor infected people 'zombies'--for after all they are not dead or undead but merely ill).
Having read Treblay's excellent A Head Full of Ghosts, I found Survivors Song, aside from its prescient qualities, weak in comparison and lacking in narrative depth. Nonetheless, it provides an entertaining journey through a panic stricken pandemic land and offers a whole host of Whoa, deja vu moments.
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