Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Ma also offers lovely meditations on memory and the immigrant experience. She’s sufficiently self-aware to see the parallels between her life before the End and the pathology of Shen Fever. Candace is great, a wonderful mix of vulnerability, wry humor, and steely strength. This is Ma’s first novel, but her fiction has appeared in distinguished journals, and she won a prize for a chapter of this book. This is a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment. Indeed, one of the projects she works on almost falls apart because it proves hard to source cheap semiprecious stones Candace is only able to complete the contract because she finds a Chinese company that doesn’t mind too much if its workers die from lung disease. The fevered aren’t all that different from the factory workers who produce Bibles for Candace’s company. The connection between existence before the End and during the time that comes after is not hard to see. A handful of people seem to be immune, though, and Candace joins a group of survivors. Women set the table for dinner over and over again. These zombies aren’t out hunting humans instead, they perform a single habit from life until their bodies fall apart.

Instead, they slide into a mechanical existence in which they repeat the same mundane actions over and over. She doesn’t go with him, so she’s in the city when Shen Fever strikes. Her boyfriend wants to leave the city and his own mindless job. She doesn’t love her job as a production assistant-she helps publishers make specialty Bibles-but it’s a steady paycheck. Candace Chen is a millennial living in Manhattan. It’s 2011, if not quite the 2011 you remember.

A post-apocalyptic-and pre-apocalyptic-debut.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma