Will Reading This Pandemic Novel Soothe You?

Usually we avoid consuming content that can depress us, right? However, there’s something about reading or watching apocalyptic fiction. The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert wasn’t upset by reading Lawrence Wright’s The End of October. The novel is set in a global pandemic in which an unfamiliar virus works its way around the world, leaving economic meltdown, conspiracy theories, and mass death in its wake. Sounds familiar? Familiar or not, the premise of the novel wasn’t stressful at all for Gilbert as she writes on her article:

This particular kind of nightmare fodder would have been stressful pre-pandemic; now you might imagine it to be excruciating. Reading The End of October, though, I felt oddly soothed. When things in real life feel appalling, there’s some comfort in reading about all the terrible events that haven’t happened (yet): mass looting and food shortages in the United States, a power cut that wipes out all the data in the cloud, the unraveling of society. And for everything that Wright seems to have anticipated, he gets one thing strikingly, consolingly wrong. Human nature, in the novel, is inherently savage. “All the virtues—loyalty, patriotism, courage, honesty, faith, compassion, you name it—are just social constructs, patches to cover the naked barbarism that is at our core,” a government employee named Matilda Nichinsky thinks in one scene. Granted, Tildy is a cynic and a nihilist, but as Kongoli devastates the U.S., her take on human frailty is borne out. The scenes that haunted me the most in the book weren’t the ones with lungs frothily disintegrating into pink mush or world leaders bleeding from their eyeballs on camera. They were the moments when people took advantage of the chaos to liberate their most monstrous selves.