I read Ling Ma’s
Severance in December 2019, just weeks before COVID-19 emerged in China. If you’re not familiar, the novel surrounds Candance Chen, a young woman who lives and works in New York when Shen Fever strikes. This fictional virus renders people zombie-like, turning them into shells of their past selves. The afflicted are trapped in a loop enacting daily tasks in mindless repetition until they die. There is no cure, and the virus sweeps the globe in a slow-moving apocalypse.
“The End begins before you are ever aware of it,” the first chapter opens. As I read those words in late 2019, part of our world was churning toward an end of its own—but of course I couldn’t know it at the time.